Created 10 Feb 2012 -- Last change 14 Feb 2012
By Victor Penso

Collectd-Interface provides a web user-interface to data stored by Collectd. Furthermore it serves a REST interface to all RRD files of Collectd.

Download and install Collectd following the instructions from the developers.

On Debian flavored Linux use:

apt-get install collectd rrdtool

You will need RRDtool too.

Install the Collectd-Interface RubyGem:

gem install collectd-interface

Get help:

collectd-interface-daemon --help

Start the Collectd-Interface in fore-ground:

collectd-interface-daemon

Open the web-interface at localhost:4567. Collectd-Interface expects the RRD file in /var/lib/collectd/rrd/ by default. Overwrite it with the option -f PATH.

Start the Collectd-Interface as daemon:

collectd-interface-daemon -p 5000 -l /var/log/ -P /var/run/ &

Collectd-Interface supports plugins for graphs and reports:

collectd-interface-daemon --port 5000 --plugin-path /var/collectd/plugins

Find a collection of plugins in the collectd-interface-plugins repository.

Collectd-Interface servers three different interfaces:

1. /graph is the user-interface showing line charts of many of the data accumulated by Collectd.
2. /report presents tables of system specific information like disk capacity or a list of network sockets.
3. /data servers an REST API to all data available from Collectd RRD files.

All content from /graph, /report and /data is accessible by a REST interface, to allow embedding this content into other applications.

You can select individual graphs using the drop-down menu followed by clicking the "Show" button. In case you just want to have the image, to embed it into another web-page, use the links beneath the graph. Once the graph is generated the caller will be redirected to /image/.

Parameters

It is possible to limit the time-frame of the graph using the option start and end. They are available in the drop-down menu, and can be defined using the input fields or by appending them as URL parameters.

Following URLs demonstrate the selection of a specific graph with parameters to define a time-frame:

http://.../load?start=end-1d&end=now-2h
http://.../cpus?start=20120217&end=20120220
http://.../memory?start=end-48h&end=20120218
http://.../network-eth0?start=20120217&end=now&image=svg

Plugins

Each graph is generated from a plugin in views/graphs/. This directory is scanned when the Collectd-Interface daemon is started, and each ERB-template (*.erb) is registered. Enable/disable certain plugins using the command collectd-interface-plugins.

List all available values /data/ from Collectd. Get the time-series of a specific value.

http://.../data/interface/if_packets-eth0/rx

By default the severs will answer with averages of all data-points and an HTML document.

Parameters

http://.../value?last=36h&resolution=3600

Request only values from the last 36 hours, with a data point resolution of 1 hour (3600 seconds). Default resolution is the highest possible and you will get by default values of the last 24 hours. In the time specification you can also use (w)eeks, (d)ays and (m)inutes.

http://.../rx?function=max&format=json

Request the maximum of all data points for the past in the JSON format. Other consolidation functions are average (default) and min, for the smallest value in a time-frame.

Copyright 2012 Victor Penso

This is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.