Consul and Apache Hudi Integration

Input and output integration overview

The Consul Input Plugin collects health check metrics from a Consul server, allowing users to monitor service statuses effectively.

Writes metrics to Parquet files via Telegraf’s Parquet output plugin, preparing them for ingestion into Apache Hudi’s lakehouse architecture.

Integration details

Consul

The Consul Input Plugin is designed to gather health check statuses from all services registered with Consul, a tool for service discovery and infrastructure management. By querying the Consul API, this plugin helps users monitor the health of their services and ensure that they are operational and meeting service level agreements. It does not provide telemetry data, but users can utilize StatsD if they want to collect those metrics. The plugin offers configuration options to connect to the Consul server, manage authentication, and specify how to handle tags derived from health checks.

Apache Hudi

This configuration leverages Telegraf’s Parquet plugin to serialize metrics into columnar Parquet files suitable for downstream ingestion by Apache Hudi. The plugin writes metrics grouped by metric name into files in a specified directory, buffering writes for efficiency and optionally rotating files on timers. It considers schema compatibility—metrics with incompatible schemas are dropped—ensuring consistency. Apache Hudi can then consume these Parquet files via tools like DeltaStreamer or Spark jobs, enabling transactional ingestion, time-travel queries, and upserts on your time series data.

Configuration

Consul

[[inputs.consul]]
  ## Consul server address
  # address = "localhost:8500"

  ## URI scheme for the Consul server, one of "http", "https"
  # scheme = "http"

  ## Metric version controls the mapping from Consul metrics into
  ## Telegraf metrics. Version 2 moved all fields with string values
  ## to tags.
  ##
  ##   example: metric_version = 1; deprecated in 1.16
  ##            metric_version = 2; recommended version
  # metric_version = 1

  ## ACL token used in every request
  # token = ""

  ## HTTP Basic Authentication username and password.
  # username = ""
  # password = ""

  ## Data center to query the health checks from
  # datacenter = ""

  ## 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 = true

  ## Consul checks' tag splitting
  # When tags are formatted like "key:value" with ":" as a delimiter then
  # they will be split and reported as proper key:value in Telegraf
  # tag_delimiter = ":"

Apache Hudi

[[outputs.parquet]]
  ## Directory to write parquet files in. If a file already exists the output
  ## will attempt to continue using the existing file.
  directory = "/var/lib/telegraf/hudi_metrics"

  ## File rotation interval (default is no rotation)
  # rotation_interval = "1h"

  ## Buffer size before writing (default is 1000 metrics)
  # buffer_size = 1000

  ## Optional: compression codec (snappy, gzip, etc.)
  # compression_codec = "snappy"

  ## When grouping metrics, each metric name goes to its own file
  ## If a metric’s schema doesn’t match the existing schema, it will be dropped

Input and output integration examples

Consul

1. Service Health Monitoring Dashboard: Utilize the Consul Input Plugin to create a comprehensive health monitoring dashboard for all services registered with Consul. This allows operations teams to visualize the health status in real time, enabling quick identification of service issues and facilitating rapid responses to service outages or performance degradation.

2. Automated Alerting System: Implement an automated alerting system that uses the health check data gathered by the Consul Input Plugin to trigger notifications whenever a service status changes to critical. This setup can integrate with notification systems like Slack or email, ensuring that team members are alerted immediately to address potential issues.

3. Integration with Incident Management: Leverage the health check data from the Consul Input Plugin to feed into incident management systems. By analyzing the health status trends, teams can prioritize incidents based on the criticality of the affected services and streamline their resolution processes, improving overall service reliability and customer satisfaction.

Apache Hudi

1. Transactional Lakehouse Metrics: Buffer and write Web service metrics as Parquet files for DeltaStreamer to ingest into Hudi, enabling upserts, ACID compliance, and time-travel on historical performance data.

2. Edge Device Batch Analytics: Telegraf running on IoT gateways writes metrics to Parquet locally, where periodic Spark jobs ingest them into Hudi for long-term analytics and traceability.

3. Schema-Enforced Abnormal Metric Handling: Use Parquet plugin’s strict schema-dropping behavior to prevent malformed or unexpected metric changes. Hudi ingestion then guarantees consistent schema and data quality in downstream datasets.

4. Data Platform Integration: Store Telegraf metrics as Parquet files in an S3/ADLS landing zone. Hudi’s Spark-based ingestion pipeline then loads them into a unified, queryable lakehouse with business events and logs.

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