This is a simple Ubuntu base with collectd and
smartmontools installed, which provides
smartctl allowing this container to monitor the SMART
statistics for the physical drives in the host computer. It also
supports all the usual collect plugins, though I have not tested them
all. To keep the image small I've included only critical packages for
collectd and SMART monitoring, so there may be a library or some other
component that is missing, thereby breaking some plugins. These can be
added by altering the Dockerfile to explicitly include the required
libraries or packages, then building a new image. I'd happily accept
any input on what changes/additions to make. The container comes
pre-configured to push metrics gathered to a graphite instance that you
will need to create (or already have). You can configure the container
to use a specific graphite instance by updating the smart plugin
configuration in the provided collectd.conf file, or by providing your
own replacement collectd.conf file by way of a volume or bind-mounted
file. I'll leave it up to you to decide which, but this config
facilitates both approaches with a little careful confguration of the
docker parameters. Similarly, you could configure collectd to use any
of the standard write_ plugins to push data to your
preferred destination (rrdtool/kafka/redis etc.). Make whatever other
configuration changes are necessary in
/etc/collectd/collectd.conf to meet your requirements.
First, create a volume for the collectd.conf file to go in with :
docker volume create collectd-config
Put your collectd.conf
file in this volume in the _data folder, if you have one, if not,
there's a configured sample in the image that will be used by default.
Next, start the container with: docker run -d -it --privileged
--name=collectd
-e TZ=Europe/London
-v collectd-config:/config
-v
/var/lib/docker/volumes/collectd-config/_data/collectd.conf:/etc/collectd/collectd.conf
--restart unless-stopped
gregewing/collectd
Notes
- For smartctl to be able to read the underlying hardware metrics,
including SMART data from the physical drives, this container must run
privileged. if you dont need those things, you probably can
still use this container for general
collectdmonitoring without running it in privileged mode., - I've connected a
volume to this container at
/config/purely as a safe holding place for the collectd config file. I've also bind-mounted thecollectd.conffile directly to/etc/collectd/collect.conf.
Attaching the volume and the file like this means the volume containing the config file does not show up as unused in docker, which means it might be deleted when pruning stale volumes. I know some people will prefer to do things differently, but this suits me. (Suggestions for improvements welcomed) - For the 'df' plugin to provide data on mounts and RAID volumes on the host, you may need to add a read-only bind mount to this container.
- This build will be updated approximately monthly to ensure the Ubuntu build, and the software installed in the container are up to date.
- If you would like to customise this container further, use this Dockerfile.