Collecting measurements

The collectd project is the de facto standard setup for server statistics: it grabs all kinds of local statistics (network counters, disk I/O, etc) and logs it locally or to a remote collectd, say on a dedicated statistics machine. It's a very modular system: everything is in plugins, including input sources like SNMP and OneWire. The default output plugin is the venerable RRDtool. This stores values and averages them over time, and creates graphs on demand.

Collectd has just released version 5.4, now with a sigrok plugin. That means any device which can be accessed via libsigrok can feed information to collectd, for storage and graphing with RRDtool or any other output plugin. This is intended for the many analog devices supported in libsigrok, not the oscilloscopes and logic analyzers of course.

These graphs were made using a CEM DT-8852 sound level meter and UNI-T UT325 thermometer:

These show my clunky old air conditioning unit adding a whopping 19 dB(A) to the noise level, and the effect that has on the temperature. I also watched a very loud movie with lots of explosions in the evening! Here's the collectd configuration that generated the above:

LoadPlugin "sigrok"
<Plugin "sigrok">
    LogLevel 3
    <Device "Sound level">
        Driver "cem-dt-885x"
        conn "/dev/ttyUSB3"
        MinimumInterval 1
    </Device>
    <Device "Temperature">
        Driver "uni-t-ut32x"
        conn "1a86.e008"
        MinimumInterval 1
    </Device>
</Plugin>