Collectd - An Overview

Collectd is an open source project providing a daemon which collects, transforms and stores system statistics including CPU, RAM Usage, Disk / Network IO, and many more. These statistics can be used for system performance monitoring, troubleshooting and capacity planning. The collectd project has been in active development since 2006, and is available for most UNIX-like systems.

Why collectd?

Wormly chose collectd as the foundation of our system metrics collection because it's a proven, successful and trusted open source project.

Its advantages are well summarized by the collectd team themselves:

“It comes with over 90 plugins which range from standard cases to very specialized and advanced topics. It provides powerful networking features and is extensible in numerous ways. It's written in C for performance and portability, allowing it to run on systems without a scripting language or cron daemon, such as embedded systems. Last but not least: collectd is actively developed and supported and well documented.

Packaged for use with Wormly Metrics

Although collectd is available through the default software repositories in modern GNU/Linux distributions, we also offer our own distribution for older platforms including RHEL/Centos 6, Ubuntu version prior to 18.04 and Amazon Linux V1. This is to ensure those users have access to the newest collectd version, and immediate access to the performance improvements and bugfixes we have contributed back to the collectd community.

For all newer versions of RHEL and Debian derived operating systems, our installer uses native packages and configures a seperate system service named collectd-wormly

To install collectd, simply create a Wormly host, then follow the instructions found under the Metrics tab on that hosts' Host Overview page.

Security

Collectd runs with root user permissions - something we consider to be an unfortunate requirement and that we expect to change in future versions. That said, the daemon as configured for use with Wormly Metrics does not listen on any network interfaces or sockets, minimizing the attack surface for security vulnerabilities.

Our installation process - by necessity of performing package management / installation functions - also runs as root. Naturally you can inspect the installation script before executing it, as well as view all of our collectd and supporting scripts source code on GitHub.

All data in transit between your systems and ours - including the entirely of our web interface and Metric submission + APIs - takes places over TLS secured HTTPS. This includes all data submitted by collectd.