Fluentd and AWS Redshift Integration

Input and output integration overview

The Fluentd Input Plugin gathers metrics from Fluentd’s in_monitor plugin endpoint. It provides insights into various plugin metrics while allowing for custom configurations to reduce series cardinality.

This plugin enables Telegraf to send metrics to Amazon Redshift using the PostgreSQL plugin, allowing metrics to be stored in a scalable, SQL-compatible data warehouse.

Integration details

Fluentd

This plugin gathers metrics from the Fluentd plugin endpoint provided by the in_monitor plugin. It reads data from the /api/plugin.json resource and allows exclusion of specific plugins based on their type.

AWS Redshift

This configuration uses the Telegraf PostgreSQL plugin to send metrics to Amazon Redshift, AWS’s fully managed cloud data warehouse that supports SQL-based analytics at scale. Although Redshift is based on PostgreSQL 8.0.2, it does not support all standard PostgreSQL features such as full JSONB, stored procedures, or upserts. Therefore, care must be taken to predefine compatible tables and schema when using Telegraf for Redshift integration. This setup is ideal for use cases that benefit from long-term, high-volume metric storage and integration with AWS analytics tools like QuickSight or Redshift Spectrum. Metrics stored in Redshift can be joined with business datasets for rich observability and BI analysis.

Configuration

Fluentd

[[inputs.fluentd]]
  ## This plugin reads information exposed by fluentd (using /api/plugins.json endpoint).
  ##
  ## Endpoint:
  ## - only one URI is allowed
  ## - https is not supported
  endpoint = "http://localhost:24220/api/plugins.json"

  ## Define which plugins have to be excluded (based on "type" field - e.g. monitor_agent)
  exclude = [
    "monitor_agent",
    "dummy",
  ]

AWS Redshift

[[outputs.postgresql]]
  ## Redshift connection settings
  host = "redshift-cluster.example.us-west-2.redshift.amazonaws.com"
  port = 5439
  user = "telegraf"
  password = "YourRedshiftPassword"
  database = "metrics"
  sslmode = "require"

  ## Optional: specify a dynamic table template for inserting metrics
  table_template = "telegraf_metrics"

  ## Note: Redshift does not support all PostgreSQL features; ensure your table exists and is compatible

Input and output integration examples

Fluentd

1. Basic Configuration: Set up the Fluentd Input Plugin to gather metrics from your Fluentd instance’s monitoring endpoint, ensuring you are able to track performance and usage statistics.
2. Excluding Plugins: Use the exclude option to ignore specific plugins’ metrics that are not necessary for your monitoring needs, streamlining data collection and focusing on what matters.
3. Custom Plugin ID: Implement the @id parameter in your Fluentd configuration to maintain a consistent plugin_id, which helps avoid issues with high series cardinality during frequent restarts.

AWS Redshift

1. Business-Aware Infrastructure Monitoring: Store infrastructure metrics from Telegraf in Redshift alongside sales, marketing, or customer engagement data. Analysts can correlate system performance with business KPIs using SQL joins and window functions.

2. Historical Trend Analysis for Cloud Resources: Use Telegraf to continuously log CPU, memory, and I/O metrics to Redshift. Combine with time-series SQL queries and visualization tools like Amazon QuickSight to spot trends and forecast resource demand.

3. Security Auditing of System Behavior: Send metrics related to system logins, file changes, or resource spikes into Redshift. Analysts can build dashboards or reports for compliance auditing using SQL queries across multi-year data sets.

4. Cross-Environment SLA Reporting: Aggregate SLA metrics from multiple cloud accounts and regions using Telegraf, and push them to a central Redshift warehouse. Enable unified SLA compliance dashboards and executive reporting via a single SQL interface.

Feedback

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