Apache Aurora and Cortex Integration

Input and output integration overview

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

This plugin enables Telegraf to send metrics to Cortex using the Prometheus remote write protocol, allowing seamless ingestion into Cortex’s scalable, multi-tenant time series storage.

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.

Cortex

With Telegraf’s HTTP output plugin and the prometheusremotewrite data format you can send metrics directly to Cortex, a horizontally scalable, long-term storage backend for Prometheus. Cortex supports multi-tenancy and accepts remote write requests using the Prometheus protobuf format. By using Telegraf as the collection agent and Remote Write as the transport mechanism, organizations can extend observability into sources not natively supported by Prometheus—such as Windows hosts, SNMP-enabled devices, or custom application metrics—while leveraging Cortex’s high-availability and long-retention capabilities.

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

Cortex

[[outputs.http]]
  ## Cortex Remote Write endpoint
  url = "http://cortex.example.com/api/v1/push"

  ## Use POST to send data
  method = "POST"

  ## Send metrics using Prometheus remote write format
  data_format = "prometheusremotewrite"

  ## Optional HTTP headers for authentication
  # [outputs.http.headers]
  #   X-Scope-OrgID = "your-tenant-id"
  #   Authorization = "Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN"

  ## Optional TLS configuration
  # tls_ca = "/path/to/ca.pem"
  # tls_cert = "/path/to/cert.pem"
  # tls_key = "/path/to/key.pem"
  # insecure_skip_verify = false

  ## Request timeout
  timeout = "10s"

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.

Cortex

1. Unified Multi-Tenant Monitoring: Use Telegraf to collect metrics from different teams or environments and push them to Cortex with separate X-Scope-OrgID headers. This enables isolated data ingestion and querying per tenant, ideal for managed services and platform teams.

2. Extending Prometheus Coverage to Edge Devices: Deploy Telegraf on edge or IoT devices to collect system metrics and send them to a centralized Cortex cluster. This approach ensures consistent observability even for environments without local Prometheus scrapers.

3. Global Service Observability with Federated Tenants: Aggregate metrics from global infrastructure by configuring Telegraf agents to push data into regional Cortex clusters, each tagged with tenant identifiers. Cortex handles deduplication and centralized access across regions.

4. Custom App Telemetry Pipeline: Collect app-specific telemetry via Telegraf’s exec or http input plugins and forward it to Cortex. This allows DevOps teams to monitor app-specific KPIs in a scalable, query-efficient format while keeping metrics logically grouped by tenant or service.

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