NATS and Microsoft Fabric Integration

Input and output integration overview

The NATS Consumer Input Plugin enables real-time data consumption from NATS messaging subjects, integrating seamlessly into the Telegraf data pipeline for monitoring and metrics gathering.

The Microsoft Fabric plugin writes metrics to Real time analytics in Fabric services, enabling powerful data storage and analysis capabilities.

Integration details

NATS

The NATS Consumer Plugin allows Telegraf to read metrics from specified NATS subjects and create metrics based on supported input data formats. Utilizing a Queue Group allows multiple instances of Telegraf to read from a NATS cluster in parallel, enhancing throughput and reliability. This plugin also supports various authentication methods, including username/password, NATS credentials files, and nkey seed files, ensuring secure communication with the NATS servers. It is particularly useful in environments where data persistence and message reliability are critical, thanks to features such as JetStream that facilitate the consumption of historical messages. Additionally, the ability to configure various operational parameters makes this plugin suitable for high-throughput scenarios while maintaining performance integrity.

Microsoft Fabric

This plugin allows you to leverage Microsoft Fabric’s capabilities to store and analyze your Telegraf metrics. Eventhouse is a high-performance, scalable data-store designed for real-time analytics. It allows you to ingest, store and query large volumes of data with low latency. The plugin supports both events and metrics with versatile grouping options. It provides various configuration parameters including connection strings specifying details like the data source, ingestion types, and which tables to use for storage. With support for streaming ingestion and event streams, this plugin enables seamless integration and data flow into Microsoft’s analytics ecosystem, allowing for rich data querying capabilities and near-real-time processing.

Configuration

NATS

[[inputs.nats_consumer]]
  ## urls of NATS servers
  servers = ["nats://localhost:4222"]

  ## subject(s) to consume
  ## If you use jetstream you need to set the subjects
  ## in jetstream_subjects
  subjects = ["telegraf"]

  ## jetstream subjects
  ## jetstream is a streaming technology inside of nats.
  ## With jetstream the nats-server persists messages and
  ## a consumer can consume historical messages. This is
  ## useful when telegraf needs to restart it don't miss a
  ## message. You need to configure the nats-server.
  ## https://docs.nats.io/nats-concepts/jetstream.
  jetstream_subjects = ["js_telegraf"]

  ## name a queue group
  queue_group = "telegraf_consumers"

  ## Optional authentication with username and password credentials
  # username = ""
  # password = ""

  ## Optional authentication with NATS credentials file (NATS 2.0)
  # credentials = "/etc/telegraf/nats.creds"

  ## Optional authentication with nkey seed file (NATS 2.0)
  # nkey_seed = "/etc/telegraf/seed.txt"

  ## Use Transport Layer Security
  # secure = false

  ## 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

  ## Sets the limits for pending msgs and bytes for each subscription
  ## These shouldn't need to be adjusted except in very high throughput scenarios
  # pending_message_limit = 65536
  # pending_bytes_limit = 67108864

  ## Max undelivered messages
  ## This plugin uses tracking metrics, which ensure messages are read to
  ## outputs before acknowledging them to the original broker to ensure data
  ## is not lost. This option sets the maximum messages to read from the
  ## broker that have not been written by an output.
  ##
  ## This value needs to be picked with awareness of the agent's
  ## metric_batch_size value as well. Setting max undelivered messages too high
  ## can result in a constant stream of data batches to the output. While
  ## setting it too low may never flush the broker's messages.
  # max_undelivered_messages = 1000

  ## Data format to consume.
  ## Each data format has its own unique set of configuration options, read
  ## more about them here:
  ## https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/blob/master/docs/DATA_FORMATS_INPUT.md
  data_format = "influx"

Microsoft Fabric

[[outputs.microsoft_fabric]]
  ## The URI property of the resource on Azure
  connection_string = "https://trd-abcd.xx.kusto.fabric.microsoft.com;Database=kusto_eh;Table Name=telegraf_dump;Key=value"

  ## Client timeout
  # timeout = "30s"

Input and output integration examples

NATS

1. Real-Time Analytics Dashboard: Utilize the NATS plugin to gather metrics from various NATS subjects in real time and feed them into a centralized analytics dashboard. This setup allows for immediate visibility into live application performance, enabling teams to react swiftly to operational issues or performance degradation.

2. Distributed System Monitoring: Deploy multiple instances of Telegraf configured with the NATS plugin across a distributed architecture. This approach allows teams to aggregate metrics from various microservices efficiently, providing a holistic view of system health and performance while ensuring no messages are dropped during transmission.

3. Historical Message Recovery: Leverage the capabilities of NATS JetStream along with this plugin to recover and process historical messages after Telegraf has been restarted. This feature is particularly beneficial for applications that require high reliability, ensuring that no critical metrics are lost even in case of service disruptions.

4. Dynamic Load Balancing: Implement a dynamic load balancing scenario where Telegraf instances consume messages from a NATS cluster based on load. Adjust the queue group settings to control the number of active consumers, allowing for better resource utilization and performance scaling as demand fluctuations occur.

Microsoft Fabric

1. Real-time Monitoring Dashboards: Utilize the Microsoft Fabric plugin to feed live metrics from your applications into a real-time dashboard on Microsoft Fabric. This allows teams to visualize key performance indicators instantly, enabling quick decision-making and timely responses to performance issues.

2. Automated Data Ingestion from IoT Devices: Use this plugin in scenarios where metrics from IoT devices need to be ingested into Azure for analysis. Using the plugin’s capabilities, data can be streamed continuously, facilitating real-time analytics and reporting without complex coding efforts.

3. Cross-Platform Data Aggregation: Leverage the plugin to consolidate metrics from multiple systems and applications into a single Azure Data Explorer table. This use case enables easier data management and analysis by centralizing disparate data sources within a unified analytics framework.

4. Enhanced Event Transformation Workflows: Integrate the plugin with Eventstreams to facilitate real-time event ingestion and transformation. By configuring different metrics and partition keys, users can manipulate the flow of data as it enters the system, allowing for advanced processing before the data reaches its final destination.

Feedback

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