Telegraf

Telegraf is part of the TICK Stack and is a plugin-driven server agent for collecting and reporting metrics. Telegraf has integrations to source a variety of metrics, events, and logs directly from the containers and systems it’s running on, pull metrics from third-party APIs, or even listen for metrics via a StatsD and Kafka consumer services. It also has output plugins to send metrics to a variety of other data stores, services, and message queues, including InfluxDB, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Datadog, Librato, Kafka, MQTT, NSQ, and many others.

Prerequisites

• Kubernetes 1.4+ with Beta APIs enabled

Design goals are to have a minimal memory footprint with a plugin system so that developers in the community can easily add support for collecting metrics.

• Telegraf is plugin-driven and has the concept of 4 distinct plugin types:
• Input Plugins collect metrics from the system, services, or 3rd party APIs
• Processor Plugins transform, decorate, and/or filter metrics
• Aggregator Plugins create aggregate metrics (e.g. mean, min, max, quantiles, etc.)
• Output Plugins write metrics to various destinations

New plugins are designed to be easy to contribute, we’ll eagerly accept pull requests and will manage the set of plugins that Telegraf supports.

Collect and send all kinds of data

1. Databases: Connect to data sources like MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, and others to collect and send metrics.
2. Systems: Collect metrics from your modern stack of cloud platforms, containers, and orchestrators.
3. IoT Sensors: Collect critical stateful data (pressure levels, temp levels, etc.) from IoT sensors and devices.

Agent

Telegraf is a metric collection daemon that can collect metrics from a wide array of inputs and write them into a wide array of outputs. It is plugin-driven for both collection and output of data so it is easily extendable. It is written in Go, which means that it is a compiled and standalone binary that can be executed on any system with no need for external dependencies, no npm, pip, gem, or other package management tools required.

Coverage

With over 200 plugins already written by subject matter experts on the data in the community, it is easy to start collecting metrics from your end-points. Even better, the ease of plugin development means you can build your own plugin to fit with your monitoring needs. You can even use Telegraf to parse the input data formats into metrics. These include InfluxDB Line Protocol, JSON, Graphite, Value, Nagios, and Collectd.

Flexible

The Telegraf plugin architecture supports your processes and does not force you to change your workflows to work with the technology. Whether you need it to sit on the edge, or in a centralized manner, it just fits with your architecture instead of the other way around. Telegraf’s flexibility makes it an easy decision to implement.