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What is Collectd: A Beginner’s Guide

Most business technology environments today run on a basis of one thing: data analytics. The ability to collect, monitor, and leverage metrics is crucial to the performance of any company. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to measure data sources and track the transmission of information on a massive scale. That’s where software solutions come in to help business leaders and IT teams. 

Collectd is one example of an application or daemon which collects information on system and application performance according to a periodic schedule. A daemon is a program in a multi-tasking operating system for a computer which runs as a background process, rather than operating according to the direct control of a front-level interactive user.  Collectd runs on application, server, and container environments, and generates data which can be automatically delivered over a network into a server for analyzing and indexing that information. With this technology, companies can access mechanisms for the storage of data values in various ways.

What Does Collectd Do?

If you’re wondering what is Collectd and what it does, the Collectd technology basically brings information in a more efficient way, to reduce the manual confusion associated with leveraging and aligning information. The daemon gathers metrics from a host of sources, including the operating system, logfiles, applications, external devise and more, and stores this information in a specific location. You can also arrange for Collectd to make the data available on a shared network. 

The metrics and statistics you collect can then be used to monitor systems on a wider scale, track potential performance problems and bottlenecks, and even potentially predict future system load in the case of capacity planning. You can even just create an attractive and easy-to-share graph of your private server’s performance. Collectd can apply a lot of valuable elements to the data collected, such as dimensions, metric names, and time stamps, to help with data usage. 

Collected has a range of primary advantages compared to other similar tools – as it’s completely free to use, and extremely lightweight. The solution has a very small footprint thanks to its unique modular architecture, and it works on a range of plugins and devices. The Collectd solution can also help to reduce a company’s dependency on specific software vendors, collecting and transmitting metrics which you can access with a range of tools. The service also gives you absolute flexibility in the information you collect. With Collectd, business users and marketers can choose the metrics, parameters and attributes essential to their data decision making.

Is Collectd a Good Investment?

Although getting used to a solution like Collectd can seem a little complicated at first, the service is a highly impressive and solid monitoring agent which is often seen as extensible, flexible, and powerful by market leaders. If you’re looking for ease of use and versatility, you can get it with this technology. Another point to note is that the technology is written for portability and performance, so you can run it on systems without any access to scripting language, like embedded system. There are also more than 100 plugins available to help you handle hundreds of thousands of metrics, for various use cases.

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