Kibana and SigNoz 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 configuration turns any Telegraf agent into a Remote Write publisher for SigNoz, streaming rich metrics straight into the SigNoz backend with a single URL change.

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.

SigNoz

SigNoz is an open source observability platform that stores metrics, traces, and logs. When you deploy SigNoz, its signoz-otel-collector-metrics service exposes a Prometheus Remote Write receiver (default :13133/api/v1/write). By configuring Telegraf’s Prometheus plugin to point at this endpoint, you can push any Telegraf collected metrics, SNMP counters, cloud services, or business KPIs—directly into SigNoz. The plugin natively serializes metrics in the Remote Write protobuf format, supports external labels, metadata export, retries, and TLS or bearer-token auth, so it fits zero-trust and multi-tenant SigNoz clusters. Inside SigNoz, the data lands in ClickHouse tables that back Metrics Explorer, alert rules, and unified dashboards. This approach lets organizations unify Prometheus and OTLP pipelines, enables long-term retention powered by ClickHouse compression, and avoids vendor lock-in while retaining PromQL-style queries.

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"

SigNoz

[[outputs.prometheusremotewrite]]
  ## SigNoz OTEL-Collector metrics endpoint (Prometheus Remote Write receiver)
  ## Default port is 13133 when you install SigNoz with the Helm chart
  url = "http://signoz-otel-collector-metrics.monitoring.svc.cluster.local:13133/api/v1/write"

  ## Add identifying labels so you can slice & dice the data later
  external_labels = { host = "${HOSTNAME}", agent = "telegraf" }

  ## Forward host metadata for richer dashboards (SigNoz maps these to ClickHouse columns)
  send_metadata = true

  ## ----- Authentication (comment out what you don’t need) -----
  # bearer_token   = "$SIGNOZ_TOKEN"          # SaaS tenant token
  # basic_username = "signoz"                 # Basic auth (self-hosted)
  # basic_password = "secret"

  ## ----- TLS options (for SaaS or HTTPS self-hosted) -----
  # tls_ca                  = "/etc/ssl/certs/ca.crt"
  # tls_cert                = "/etc/telegraf/certs/telegraf.crt"
  # tls_key                 = "/etc/telegraf/certs/telegraf.key"
  # insecure_skip_verify    = false

  ## ----- Performance tuning -----
  max_batch_size = 10000      # samples per POST
  timeout        = "10s"
  retry_max      = 3

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.

SigNoz

1. Multi-Cluster Federated Monitoring: Drop a Telegraf DaemonSet into each Kubernetes cluster, tag metrics with cluster=<name>, and Remote Write them to a central SigNoz instance. Ops teams get a single PromQL window across prod, staging, and edge clusters without running Thanos sidecars.

2. Factory-Floor Edge Gateway: A rugged Intel NUC on the shop floor runs Telegraf to scrape Modbus PLCs and environmental sensors. It batches readings every 5 seconds and pushes them over an intermittent 4G link to SigNoz SaaS. ClickHouse compression keeps costs low while AI-based outlier detection in SigNoz flags overheating motors before failure.

3. SaaS Usage Metering: Telegraf runs alongside each micro-service, exporting per-tenant counters (api_calls, gigabytes_processed). Remote Write streams the data to SigNoz where a scheduled ClickHouse materialized view aggregates usage for monthly billing—no separate metering stack required.

4. Autoscaling Feedback Loop: Combine Telegraf’s Kubernetes input with the Remote Write output to publish granular pod CPU and queue-length metrics into SigNoz. A custom SigNoz alert fires when P95 latency breaches 200 ms and a GitOps controller reads that alert to trigger a HorizontalPodAutoscaler tweak—closing the loop between observability and automation.

Feedback

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