collectd was created by Florian Forster (octo) in 2005 as a lightweight system statistics collection daemon. The project emerged from the need for a simple, efficient tool to collect system metrics without the overhead of existing monitoring solutions.
The name “collectd” is a straightforward combination of “collect” and “daemon”—reflecting its purpose as a background service that collects system statistics.
- First public release by Florian Forster
- Written in C for maximum performance and minimal resource usage
- Plugin-based architecture from the start
¶ 2006-2010 - Growth and Adoption
- Rapid expansion of plugin ecosystem
- Integration with popular backends (RRDtool, Graphite)
- Adoption by hosting providers and data centers
- 100+ plugins available
- Network protocol for distributed collection
- Support for containers and virtualization
- Active community maintenance
- Continued plugin development
- Integration with modern backends (InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch)
collectd’s plugin system has been its defining feature:
- Input plugins: Collect metrics from various sources
- Output plugins: Write metrics to storage systems
- Processing plugins: Modify or aggregate metrics
- 2007: Introduction of network plugin
- Uses UDP port 25826
- Supports multicast for automatic discovery
- Binary protocol for efficiency
- Written in C for minimal overhead
- Typical memory usage: 5-20 MB
- CPU usage: <1% on modern systems
- No external dependencies for core functionality
collectd has always been licensed under the MIT License for the daemon, with some plugins under compatible open-source licenses. This permissive licensing has contributed to its widespread adoption.
collectd remains actively maintained with:
- Regular releases (typically 2-3 per year)
- 100+ plugins available
- Strong presence in Linux distributions
- Active community on GitHub and mailing lists
| Version |
Year |
Notable Changes |
| 4.x |
2005-2008 |
Initial releases, core plugins |
| 5.0 |
2009 |
Major refactor, improved plugin API |
| 5.1-5.4 |
2010-2014 |
Network improvements, new plugins |
| 5.5-5.8 |
2015-2018 |
Container support, modern backends |
| 5.9-5.12 |
2019-Present |
Security improvements, bug fixes |
| Feature |
collectd |
Telegraf |
Diamond |
| Language |
C |
Go |
Python |
| Memory |
~10 MB |
~50 MB |
~30 MB |
| Plugins |
100+ |
200+ |
~50 |
| First Release |
2005 |
2015 |
2011 |
- Large hosting providers for customer monitoring
- HPC clusters for node monitoring
- IoT deployments due to low resource usage
- Container orchestration platforms
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