Collectd
Collectd is a system statistics collection daemon that gathers metrics from various sources, such as the operating system, applications, and network devices, and stores or forwards them for monitoring and analysis. It is lightweight, written in C, and designed for performance with minimal resource usage, making it suitable for long-term data collection on servers and embedded systems. The tool supports a wide range of plugins to collect data from different inputs and output to various storage backends like RRDtool, Graphite, or InfluxDB.
Developers should learn and use Collectd when they need efficient, low-overhead monitoring of system and application metrics in production environments, especially for infrastructure monitoring, performance tuning, or capacity planning. It is ideal for use cases involving large-scale deployments, such as data centers or cloud infrastructure, where real-time and historical data collection is critical for alerting and visualization. Its plugin-based architecture allows customization for specific needs, like monitoring custom applications or integrating with modern monitoring stacks.