InfiniBand and Google BigQuery Integration

Input and output integration overview

The InfiniBand Telegraf plugin collects performance metrics from all InfiniBand devices installed on a Linux system, providing essential insights for monitoring network performance and reliability.

The Google BigQuery plugin allows Telegraf to write metrics to Google Cloud BigQuery, enabling robust data analytics capabilities for telemetry data.

Integration details

InfiniBand

This plugin gathers statistics for all InfiniBand devices and ports on the system. InfiniBand is a high-speed networking technology commonly used in high-performance computing and enterprise data centers. The plugin retrieves various performance counters from the system’s InfiniBand devices located in /sys/class/infiniband/<dev>/port/<port>/counters/. The metrics depend on the specific InfiniBand hardware and include various packet and error statistics that are essential for monitoring network health and performance. By utilizing this plugin, users can gain insights into the operational status of their InfiniBand networks, helping to identify potential issues and optimize performance.

Google BigQuery

The Google BigQuery plugin for Telegraf enables seamless integration with Google Cloud’s BigQuery service, a popular data warehousing and analytics platform. This plugin facilitates the transfer of metrics collected by Telegraf into BigQuery datasets, making it easier for users to perform analyses and generate insights from their telemetry data. It requires authentication through a service account or user credentials and is designed to handle various data types, ensuring that users can maintain the integrity and accuracy of their metrics as they are stored in BigQuery tables. The configuration options allow for customization around dataset specifications and handling metrics, including the management of hyphens in metric names, which are not supported by BigQuery for streaming inserts. This plugin is particularly useful for organizations leveraging the scalability and powerful query capabilities of BigQuery to analyze large volumes of monitoring data.

Configuration

InfiniBand

# Gets counters from all InfiniBand cards and ports installed
# This plugin ONLY supports Linux
[[inputs.infiniband]]
  # no configuration

  ## Collect RDMA counters
  # gather_rdma = false

Google BigQuery

# Configuration for Google Cloud BigQuery to send entries
[[outputs.bigquery]]
  ## Credentials File
  credentials_file = "/path/to/service/account/key.json"

  ## Google Cloud Platform Project
  # project = ""

  ## The namespace for the metric descriptor
  dataset = "telegraf"

  ## Timeout for BigQuery operations.
  # timeout = "5s"

  ## Character to replace hyphens on Metric name
  # replace_hyphen_to = "_"

  ## Write all metrics in a single compact table
  # compact_table = ""
  

Input and output integration examples

InfiniBand

1. Performance Monitoring in High-Performance Computing (HPC): Monitor the performance metrics of InfiniBand interconnects in a high-performance computing cluster. By analyzing metrics such as packet errors and throughput, system administrators can ensure optimal operation and quickly identify any performance degradation. This setup enhances the reliability of computational tasks by allowing timely interventions based on accurate monitoring data.

2. Network Health Audits: Perform routine health checks of InfiniBand networks. The detailed metrics gathered, such as excessive buffer overruns and link integrity errors, provide valuable insights for network audits. By establishing baseline performance and watching for anomalies, IT professionals can ensure the stability and performance of critical infrastructures.

3. Integration with Alerting Systems: Set up the InfiniBand plugin to work in conjunction with alerting systems to trigger notifications based on performance thresholds. For instance, if the number of link errors exceeds a predefined limit, an alert can be sent to the network operations team. This proactive approach ensures that potential issues are addressed before they impact business operations.

4. Data Visualization Dashboards: Feed InfiniBand metrics to a visualization tool to create dashboards that display the real-time performance of the network. This can help stakeholders visualize critical data such as packet transmission rates and errors, facilitating better decision-making regarding network management and capacity planning.

Google BigQuery

1. Real-Time Analytics Dashboard: Leverage the Google BigQuery plugin to feed live metrics into a custom analytics dashboard hosted on Google Cloud. This setup would allow teams to visualize performance data in real-time, providing insights into system health and usage patterns. By using BigQuery’s querying capabilities, users can easily create tailored reports and dashboards to meet their specific needs, thus enhancing decision-making processes.

2. Cost Management and Optimization Analysis: Utilize the plugin to automatically send cost-related metrics from various services into BigQuery. Analyzing this data can help businesses identify unnecessary expenses and optimize resource usage. By performing aggregation and transformation queries in BigQuery, organizations can create accurate forecasts and manage their cloud spending efficiently.

3. Cross-Team Collaboration on Monitoring Data: Enable different teams within an organization to share their monitoring data using BigQuery. With the help of this Telegraf plugin, teams can push their metrics to a central BigQuery instance, fostering collaboration. This data-sharing approach encourages best practices and cross-functional awareness, leading to collective improvements in system performance and reliability.

4. Historical Analysis for Capacity Planning: By using the BigQuery plugin, companies can collect and store historical metrics data essential for capacity planning. Analyzing trends over time can help anticipate system needs and scale infrastructure proactively. Organizations can create time-series analyses and identify patterns that inform their long-term strategic decisions.

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.