Icinga and Thanos Integration

Input and output integration overview

This plugin gathers services & hosts status using Icinga2 Remote API, providing an interface to monitor your infrastructure effectively.

This plugin sends metrics from Telegraf to Thanos using the Prometheus remote write protocol over HTTP, allowing efficient and scalable ingestion into Thanos Receive components.

Integration details

Icinga

The Icinga2 Plugin enables users to gather status information from Icinga2’s Remote API. Icinga2 is a powerful monitoring system that checks the health of hosts and services and provides detailed monitoring capabilities. The plugin facilitates retrieving metrics such as the state of hosts and services, as well as detailed API status metrics. This integration is vital for users looking to keep an eye on their infrastructure’s health and performance metrics automatically, leveraging the Icinga2’s extensive API. By utilizing this plugin, users can easily integrate Icinga2 monitoring data with other systems, providing a comprehensive view of their infrastructure status.

Thanos

Telegraf’s HTTP plugin can send metrics directly to Thanos via its Remote Write-compatible Receive component. By setting the data format to prometheusremotewrite, Telegraf can serialize metrics into the same protobuf-based format used by native Prometheus clients. This setup enables high-throughput, low-latency metric ingestion into Thanos, facilitating centralized observability at scale. It is particularly useful in hybrid environments where Telegraf is collecting metrics from systems outside Prometheus’ native reach, such as SNMP devices, Windows hosts, or custom apps, and streams them directly to Thanos for long-term storage and global querying.

Configuration

Icinga

[[inputs.icinga2]]
  ## Required Icinga2 server address
  # server = "https://localhost:5665"

  ## Collected Icinga2 objects ("services", "hosts")
  ## Specify at least one object to collect from /v1/objects endpoint.
  # objects = ["services"]

  ## Collect metrics from /v1/status endpoint
  ## Choose from:
  ##     "ApiListener", "CIB", "IdoMysqlConnection", "IdoPgsqlConnection"
  # status = []

  ## Credentials for basic HTTP authentication
  # username = "admin"
  # password = "admin"

  ## Maximum time to receive response.
  # response_timeout = "5s"

  ## 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

Thanos

[[outputs.http]]
  ## Thanos Receive endpoint for remote write
  url = "http://thanos-receive.example.com/api/v1/receive"

  ## HTTP method
  method = "POST"

  ## Data format set to Prometheus remote write
  data_format = "prometheusremotewrite"

  ## Optional headers (authorization, etc.)
  # [outputs.http.headers]
  #   Authorization = "Bearer YOUR_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

Icinga

1. Centralized Monitoring Dashboard: Integrate the Icinga2 plugin with a visualization tool to create a centralized monitoring dashboard that presents real-time statuses of all monitored services and hosts. This setup allows teams to quickly identify issues and to respond proactively, ensuring minimal downtime.

2. Automated Incident Response: Use the metrics collected by the plugin to trigger automated incident response workflows. For instance, if a service is reported as critical, an automated system could notify relevant team members and even attempt to restart the service, reducing manual intervention and speeding resolution times.

3. Service Reliability Reporting: Combine data from the Icinga with business reporting systems to generate insights on service reliability. By analyzing trends in service states over time, organizations can identify weak points in their infrastructure and improve service availability based on factual data.

4. Cross-System Alerting: Leverage the collected metrics to integrate with various alerting systems. This could route notifications based on specific Icinga2 service states to different departments or teams depending on their roles, enabling tailored and timely responses to potential issues in the infrastructure.

Thanos

1. Agentless Cloud Monitoring: Deploy Telegraf agents across cloud VMs to collect system and application metrics, then stream them directly into Thanos using Remote Write. This provides centralized observability without requiring Prometheus nodes at each location.

2. Scalable Windows Host Monitoring: Use Telegraf on Windows machines to collect OS-level metrics and send them via Remote Write to Thanos Receive. This enables observability across heterogeneous environments with native Prometheus support only on Linux.

3. Cross-Region Metrics Federation: Telegraf agents in multiple geographic regions can push data to region-local Thanos Receivers using this plugin. From there, Thanos can deduplicate and query metrics globally, reducing latency and network egress costs.

4. Integrating Third-Party Data into Thanos: Collect metrics from custom telemetry sources such as REST APIs or proprietary logs using Telegraf inputs and forward them to Thanos via Remote Write. This brings non-native data into a Prometheus-compatible, long-term analytics pipeline.

Feedback

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