Frequently Asked Questions
About Perfwatcher, Collectd and Collectd-pw
- Q: Can Perfwatcher work with the original version of Collectd ?
- R: Yes, but a lot of features will not work, particularly for the server/frontend side. At least for the server/frontend, you should use the patched collectd version we provide.
- Q: What is the difference between Collectd and Collectd-pw
-
R: Collectd-pw is the latest version of Collectd (currently the 5.4) with a set
of patch to improve Collectd or adding some features nedeed by Perfwatcher. See Collectd patches for more information.
- Q: Is this a fork of collectd ?
- R: No. We have some specific needs for perfwatcher, so we need to maintain some patches that may not be included in the official Collectd. We also develop on Collectd and we think it is a good idea to implement our patches in the Collectd-pw. We hope those patches will be included in next versions of collectd and that we will not have to maintain them as patches any longer.
- Q: How many servers can be monitored with Collectd / PerfWatcher ?
- R: The limit is your server. Collectd is hightly scallable and can be load-balanced. Actually I have 5600 servers monitored by 1 Collectd server at work.
Compilation
- Q: Compilation fails on Solaris : I have an error
"/usr/include/sys/procfs.h", line 45: #error: "Cannot use procfs in the large file compilation environment"
- R: With Sunstudio, compile with option
-m64
. For example, at configure time, run ./configure CFLAGS='-m64'
.
- Q: Compilation fails : I have an error followed with
all warnings being treated as errors
- R: Collectd compiles with gcc flag
-Werror
to prevent ignoring any warning. You can report the problem is you suspect a bug. For Collectd, please report it to the Collectd team. For Collectd patches, plase report it to the Collectd-pw/Perfwatcher team. However, this does not help much for now. You can find a workaround here : https://github.com/perfwatcher/perfwatcher/issues/36#issuecomment-30918932.
Installation
- Q:
pear install MDB2_Driver_mysql
fails because I am behind a firewall.
- R: Read the documentation of Pear (http://pear.php.net) and download the package MDB2_Driver_mysql and its dependancies (including MDB2).
If you do not have much time to read some documentation, try
pear install MDB2_Driver_mysql-<version>.tgz
and the same thing for all the dependancies (at least pear install MDB2-<version>.tgz
). Check with pear list
.