Consul and Librato 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.

The Librato plugin for Telegraf is designed to facilitate seamless integration with the Librato Metrics API, allowing for efficient metric reporting and monitoring.

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.

Librato

The Librato plugin enables Telegraf to send metrics to the Librato Metrics API. To authenticate, users must provide an api_user and api_token, which can be acquired from the Librato account settings. This integration allows for efficient monitoring and reporting of custom metrics within the Librato platform. The plugin also utilizes a source_tag option that can enrich the metrics with contextual information from Point Tags; however, it does not currently support sending associated Point Tags. It is essential to note that any point value sent that cannot be converted to a float64 type will be skipped, ensuring that only valid metrics are processed and sent to Librato. The plugin also supports secret-store options for managing sensitive authentication credentials securely, facilitating best practices in credential management.

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 = ":"

Librato

[[outputs.librato]]
  ## Librato API Docs
  ## http://dev.librato.com/v1/metrics-authentication
  ## Librato API user
  api_user = "[email protected]" # required.
  ## Librato API token
  api_token = "my-secret-token" # required.
  ## Debug
  # debug = false
  ## Connection timeout.
  # timeout = "5s"
  ## Output source Template (same as graphite buckets)
  ## see https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/blob/master/docs/DATA_FORMATS_OUTPUT.md#graphite
  ## This template is used in librato's source (not metric's name)
  template = "host"

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.

Librato

1. Real-time Application Monitoring: Utilize Librato to collect performance metrics from a web application in real-time. This setup involves sending response times, error rates, and user interactions to Librato, allowing developers to monitor the application’s health and performance metrics closely. By analyzing these metrics, teams can quickly identify and address performance bottlenecks or application failures before they impact end users.

2. Infrastructure Metrics Aggregation: Leverage this plugin to gather and send metrics from various infrastructure components, such as servers or containers, to Librato for centralized monitoring. Configuring the plugin to send CPU, memory usage, and disk I/O metrics enables system administrators to have a comprehensive view of infrastructure performance, assisting in capacity planning and resource optimization strategies.

3. Custom Metrics for Business Operations: Feed business-specific metrics, such as sales transactions or user sign-ups, to the Librato service using this plugin. By tracking these custom metrics, businesses can gain insights into their operational performance and make data-driven decisions to enhance their strategies, marketing efforts, or product development initiatives.

4. Anomaly Detection in Metrics: Implement monitoring tools that utilize machine learning for anomaly detection. By continuously sending real-time metrics to Librato, teams can analyze trends and automatically flag unusual behavior, such as sudden spikes in latency or unusual traffic patterns, enabling timely intervention and troubleshooting.

Feedback

Thank you for being part of our community! If you have any general feedback or found any bugs on these pages, we welcome and encourage your input. Please submit your feedback in the InfluxDB community Slack.