Apache Aurora and Clickhouse Integration

Input and output integration overview

This plugin gathers metrics from Apache Aurora schedulers, providing insights necessary for effective monitoring of Aurora clusters.

Telegraf’s SQL plugin sends collected metrics to an SQL database using a straightforward table schema and dynamic column generation. When configured for ClickHouse, it adjusts DSN formatting and type conversion settings to ensure seamless data integration.

Integration details

Apache Aurora

The Aurora plugin is designed to gather metrics from Apache Aurora schedulers. This plugin connects to specified schedulers using their respective URLs and retrieves operational metrics that help in monitoring the health and performance of Aurora clusters. It primarily captures numeric data from the /vars endpoint, ensuring key metrics related to task execution and resource utilization are monitored. The plugin enhances operational insights by utilizing HTTP Basic Authentication for secure access. With optional TLS configuration, it further bolsters security when transmitting data. The plugin provides a robust way to interface with Apache Aurora, reflecting a focus on operational reliability and ongoing performance assessment across distributed systems.

Clickhouse

Telegraf’s SQL plugin is engineered to write metric data into an SQL database by dynamically creating tables and columns based on incoming metrics. When configured for ClickHouse, it utilizes the clickhouse-go v1.5.4 driver, which employs a unique DSN format and a set of specialized type conversion rules to map Telegraf’s data types directly to ClickHouse’s native types. This approach ensures optimal storage and retrieval performance in high-throughput environments, making it well-suited for real-time analytics and large-scale data warehousing. The dynamic schema creation and precise type mapping enable detailed time-series data logging, crucial for monitoring modern, distributed systems.

Configuration

Apache Aurora

[[inputs.aurora]]
  ## Schedulers are the base addresses of your Aurora Schedulers
  schedulers = ["http://127.0.0.1:8081"]

  ## Set of role types to collect metrics from.
  ##
  ## The scheduler roles are checked each interval by contacting the
  ## scheduler nodes; zookeeper is not contacted.
  # roles = ["leader", "follower"]

  ## Timeout is the max time for total network operations.
  # timeout = "5s"

  ## Username and password are sent using HTTP Basic Auth.
  # username = "username"
  # password = "pa$$word"

  ## Optional TLS Config
  # tls_ca = "/etc/telegraf/ca.pem"
  # tls_cert = "/etc/telegraf/cert.pem"
  # tls_key = "/etc/telegraf/key.pem"
  ## Use TLS but skip chain & host verification
  # insecure_skip_verify = false

Clickhouse

[[outputs.sql]]
  ## Database driver
  ## Valid options include mssql, mysql, pgx, sqlite, snowflake, clickhouse
  driver = "clickhouse"

  ## Data source name
  ## For ClickHouse, the DSN follows the clickhouse-go v1.5.4 format.
  ## Example DSN: "tcp://localhost:9000?debug=true"
  data_source_name = "tcp://localhost:9000?debug=true"

  ## Timestamp column name
  timestamp_column = "timestamp"

  ## Table creation template
  ## Available template variables:
  ##  {TABLE}        - table name as a quoted identifier
  ##  {TABLELITERAL} - table name as a quoted string literal
  ##  {COLUMNS}      - column definitions (list of quoted identifiers and types)
  table_template = "CREATE TABLE {TABLE} ({COLUMNS})"

  ## Table existence check template
  ## Available template variables:
  ##  {TABLE} - table name as a quoted identifier
  table_exists_template = "SELECT 1 FROM {TABLE} LIMIT 1"

  ## Initialization SQL (optional)
  init_sql = ""

  ## Maximum amount of time a connection may be idle. "0s" means connections are never closed due to idle time.
  connection_max_idle_time = "0s"

  ## Maximum amount of time a connection may be reused. "0s" means connections are never closed due to age.
  connection_max_lifetime = "0s"

  ## Maximum number of connections in the idle connection pool. 0 means unlimited.
  connection_max_idle = 2

  ## Maximum number of open connections to the database. 0 means unlimited.
  connection_max_open = 0

  ## Metric type to SQL type conversion for ClickHouse.
  ## The conversion maps Telegraf metric types to ClickHouse native data types.
  [outputs.sql.convert]
    conversion_style = "literal"
    integer          = "Int64"
    text             = "String"
    timestamp        = "DateTime"
    defaultvalue     = "String"
    unsigned         = "UInt64"
    bool             = "UInt8"
    real             = "Float64"

Input and output integration examples

Apache Aurora

1. Dynamic Resource Allocation Monitoring: Utilize the Aurora plugin to build a real-time dashboard displaying metrics related to resource allocation in your Aurora clusters. By aggregating data from multiple schedulers, you can visualize how resources are distributed among various roles (leader and follower), enabling proactive management of resource utilization and helping prevent bottlenecks in production workloads.

2. Alerting on Scheduler Health: Implement alerting mechanisms where the Aurora plugin checks the health of schedulers periodically. If a scheduler role responds with a status that indicates a failure to communicate (non-200 status), alerts can be automatically generated and sent to the operations team via email or messaging apps, ensuring immediate attention to critical issues and maintaining availability in service management.

3. Performance Benchmarking Over Time: By continuously collecting metrics such as job update events and execution times, this plugin can assist teams in benchmarking the performance of their Apache Aurora deployment over time. Relevant metrics can be logged into a time-series database, enabling historical analysis, trend identification, and understanding how changes in the system, such as configuration adjustments or workload changes, impact performance.

4. Integration with CI/CD Pipelines: Integrate the metrics collected via the Aurora plugin with CI/CD pipeline tools to monitor how deployments affect runtime metrics in Aurora. Teams can thereby ensure that new releases do not adversely impact scheduler performance and can roll back changes seamlessly if any metric exceeds predefined thresholds after deployment.

Clickhouse

1. Real-Time Analytics for High-Volume Data: Use the plugin to feed streaming metrics from large-scale systems into ClickHouse. This setup supports ultra-fast query performance and near real-time analytics, ideal for monitoring high-traffic applications.

2. Time-Series Data Warehousing: Integrate the plugin with ClickHouse to create a robust time-series data warehouse. This use case allows organizations to store detailed historical metrics and perform complex queries for trend analysis and capacity planning.

3. Scalable Monitoring in Distributed Environments: Leverage the plugin to dynamically create tables per metric type in ClickHouse, making it easier to manage and query data from a multitude of distributed systems without prior schema definitions.

4. Optimized Storage for IoT Deployments: Deploy the plugin to ingest data from IoT sensors into ClickHouse. Its efficient schema creation and native type mapping facilitate the handling of massive volumes of data, enabling real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance.

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