This is a Docker base image for collectd system statistics collection daemon.

The image includes several configuration snippets ready to use in your custom collectd images and it is intended to be used as a base image, it does nothing on its own. You can base your own collectd image on this one and pick your desired configuration snippets.

The available snippets are located at /etc/collectd/conf-available. There are snippets for read and write plugin configurations and global options.

Put this in your own Dockerfile:

FROM pataquets/collectd

# Build our custom collectd.conf file:
# Disable FQDN lookup to avoid collectd complaining.
# Read CPU, system load and vmem stats and print them to stdout.
RUN \
  cat \
    /etc/collectd/conf-available/global-FQDNLookup-disable.conf \
    /etc/collectd/conf-available/read-cpu.conf \
    /etc/collectd/conf-available/read-load.conf \
    /etc/collectd/conf-available/read-vmem.conf \
    /etc/collectd/conf-available/write-csv-stdout.conf \
    | tee -a /etc/collectd/collectd.conf

# Print resulting collectd.conf file, just to be sure.
RUN \
  nl /etc/collectd/collectd.conf

Build it by executing:

docker build -t mycollectd .

Launch it (interactively, to check if it works):

docker run --rm -it --name collectd --privileged --uts=host mycollectd

Running collectd inside a container can be tricky. When launching the container, some flags might be needed when invoking docker run.

The reporting hostname in the collected metrics will be the container's hostname which will be confusing. To allow the container to find the host's real hostname, use the --uts=host flag. Notice that collectd will complain about the FQDN not being correctly configured. To solve this, you should include the global-FQDNLookup-disable.conf snippet in your configuration, as done in the example above.

Some plugins need access to host's /proc filesystem, which can be given by launching the container with the --privileged flag.

Warning: Not all Docker versions support the above flags. Check your version against the docs if some doesn't work.

Example run:

docker run -dit --restart=always --name collectd --uts=host <your-image-name>