Setting up Collectd Collection3 on Ubuntu Lucid 10.04

Unfortunately the wiki on how to set up collection3 is not that great. In particular it glosses over how to configure apache. But if you're running Ubuntu Lucid 10.04, it's actually pretty easy to set up collectd and collection3. I'll walk you through the steps.

First, you'll need to install the needed dependencies:

sudo apt-get update -y
sudo apt-get install -y apache2 libconfig-general-perl librrds-perl libregexp-common-perl libhtml-parser-perl collectd-core

Then we need to configure collectd to sample some data and store the data as RRDs. Drop this file in /etc/collectd/collectd.conf

LoadPlugin cpu
LoadPlugin load
LoadPlugin memory
LoadPlugin disk
LoadPlugin rrdtool
<Plugin rrdtool>
  DataDir "/var/lib/collectd/rrd/"
</Plugin>

Next we configure apache to use collection3. Copy this file into /etc/apache2/conf.d/collection3.conf

ScriptAlias /collectd/bin/ /usr/share/doc/collectd-core/examples/collection3/bin/
Alias /collectd/ /usr/share/doc/collectd-core/examples/collection3/

<Directory /usr/share/doc/collectd-core/examples/collection3/>
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
    DirectoryIndex bin/index.cgi
    Options +ExecCGI
    Order Allow,Deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Now let's start collectd and restart apache:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload
sudo /etc/init.d/collectd start

It'll take collectd a minute to gather enough data to usefully graph. Then you can point your browser to http://your.host.name/collectd/

And you'll be able to graph data!

Note 1: You may need to choose "hour" from the pulldown if you just started collectd, since it doesn't have enough data to graph a day yet
Note 2: The apache configuration is not secure; anyone could just navigate to your machine and see those graphs. Use SSL/.htaccess or other methods to lock down access