Kibana and ServiceNow Integration

Input and output integration overview

The Kibana plugin enables users to obtain status metrics from Kibana, a data visualization tool for Elasticsearch. By connecting to the Kibana API, this plugin captures various performance indicators and the health status of the Kibana service.

This output plugin streams metrics from Telegraf directly to a ServiceNow MID Server via HTTP, leveraging the nowmetric serializer for efficient integration with ServiceNow’s Operational Intelligence and Event Management.

Integration details

Kibana

The Kibana input plugin is designed to query the Kibana API to gather service status information. This plugin allows users to monitor their Kibana instances effectively by pulling metrics related to its health, performance, and operational metrics. By querying the Kibana API, this plugin provides insights into key parameters such as the current health status (green, yellow, red), uptime, heap memory usage, and request performance metrics. This information is crucial for administrators and operational teams looking to maintain optimal system performance and quickly address any issues that may arise. The configuration settings allow for flexible integration with other components in a microservices architecture, facilitating comprehensive monitoring solutions aligned with organizational needs, making it an essential tool for those leveraging the Elastic Stack in their infrastructure.

ServiceNow

Telegraf can be used to send metric data directly to a ServiceNow MID Server REST endpoint. Metrics are formatted either using ServiceNow’s Operational Intelligence (OI) format or JSONv2 format, enabling seamless integration with ServiceNow’s Event Management and Operational Intelligence platforms. The serializer batches metrics efficiently, reducing network overhead by minimizing the number of HTTP POST requests. This integration allows users to quickly leverage metrics in ServiceNow for enhanced observability, proactive incident management, and performance monitoring, with ServiceNow’s operational intelligence capabilities.

Configuration

Kibana

[[inputs.kibana]]
  ## Specify a list of one or more Kibana servers
  servers = ["http://localhost:5601"]

  ## Timeout for HTTP requests
  timeout = "5s"

  ## HTTP Basic Auth credentials
  # username = "username"
  # password = "pa$$word"

  ## 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 = false
 
  ## If 'use_system_proxy' is set to true, Telegraf will check env vars such as
  ## HTTP_PROXY, HTTPS_PROXY, and NO_PROXY (or their lowercase counterparts).
  ## If 'use_system_proxy' is set to false (default) and 'http_proxy_url' is
  ## provided, Telegraf will use the specified URL as HTTP proxy.
  # use_system_proxy = false
  # http_proxy_url = "http://localhost:8888"

ServiceNow

[[outputs.http]]
  ## ServiceNow MID Server metrics endpoint
  url = "http://mid-server.example.com:9082/api/mid/sa/metrics"

  ## HTTP request method
  method = "POST"

  ## Basic Authentication credentials
  username = "evt.integration"
  password = "P@$$w0rd!"

  ## Data serialization format for ServiceNow
  data_format = "nowmetric"

  ## Metric format type: "oi" (default) or "jsonv2"
  nowmetric_format = "oi"

  ## HTTP Headers
  [outputs.http.headers]
    Content-Type = "application/json"
    Accept = "application/json"

  ## Optional timeout
  # timeout = "5s"

  ## TLS configuration options
  # tls_ca = "/etc/telegraf/ca.pem"
  # tls_cert = "/etc/telegraf/cert.pem"
  # tls_key = "/etc/telegraf/key.pem"
  # insecure_skip_verify = false

Input and output integration examples

Kibana

1. Kibana Health Monitoring: Implement a dedicated dashboard to periodically poll the metrics from Kibana. This setup allows operations teams to have a real-time view of their Kibana instances’ health and metrics, enabling proactive performance management and immediate response capabilities in case of service degradation or failure.

2. Automated Alerting System: Integrate the metrics gathered from the Kibana plugin with an alerting system using tools like Prometheus or PagerDuty. By setting thresholds for key metrics (e.g., response time or heap usage), this integration can automatically notify the relevant personnel of performance issues, thereby reducing downtime and improving the response time for operational issues.

3. Resource Optimization Strategy: Use the memory usage and response time metrics collected by this plugin to formulate strategies for optimizing resource allocation in Kubernetes or other orchestration platforms. By analyzing trends over time, teams can adjust resource limits and requests dynamically, ensuring that Kibana instances function efficiently without over-provisioning resources.

ServiceNow

1. Proactive Incident Management: Utilize the Telegraf and ServiceNow integration to stream infrastructure and application metrics in real-time to ServiceNow Event Management. Automatically trigger incidents or remediation workflows based on thresholds, significantly reducing incident detection and response times.

2. End-to-End Application Monitoring: Deploy Telegraf agents across multiple layers of an application stack, sending performance metrics directly into ServiceNow. Leveraging ServiceNow’s Operational Intelligence, teams can correlate metrics across components, quickly identifying performance bottlenecks.

3. Dynamic CI Performance Tracking: Integrate Telegraf metrics with ServiceNow’s CMDB by using this plugin to push performance data, allowing automatic updates of Configuration Item (CI) health states based on live metrics. This ensures an accurate and current state of infrastructure health in ServiceNow.

4. Cloud Resource Optimization: Collect metrics from hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures using Telegraf, streaming directly to ServiceNow. Leverage these metrics for real-time analytics, predictive capacity planning, and resource optimization, enabling proactive management and reduced operational costs.

Feedback

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