Telegraf

Telegraf is the open source server agent to help you collect metrics from your stacks, sensors, and systems.

Why use Telegraf?

Telegraf is a server-based agent for collecting and sending all metrics and events from databases, systems, and IoT sensors. Telegraf is written in Go and compiles into a single binary with no external dependencies, and requires a very minimal memory footprint.

Collect and store all kinds of data:

IoT sensors

Collect critical stateful data (pressure levels, temp levels, etc.) with popular protocols like MQTT, ModBus, OPC-UA, and Kafka.

DevOps Tools and frameworks

Gather metrics from cloud platforms, containers, and orchestrators like GitHub, Kubernetes, CloudWatch, Prometheus, and more.

System telemetry

Metrics from system telemetry like iptables, Netstat, NGINX, and HAProxy help provide a full stack view of your apps.

InfluxDB features

Agent for collecting

Telegraf is an open source plugin-driven server agent for collecting and reporting metrics. It is written in Go and compiled as a standalone binary so that it can be executed on any system with no external dependencies. Telegraf also contains in-memory metric buffers to maintain data collection if the downstream database is temporarily unavailable.

Coverage

With 300+ plugins written by community members who are subject matter experts on the data, Telegraf is the way to start collecting metrics from cloud services, applications, IoT sensors and more. It enables flexible parsing and serializing for a variety of data formats (such as JSON, CSV, Graphite) and can serialize the data in InfluxDB line protocol and Prometheus to name a few.

Robust delivery

Telegraf has reliable metric delivery guarantees with flow back-pressure. It also includes a scheduler, adjusts for clockdrift, full streaming support, and allows you to parse, format, or serialize your unstructured data before sending it to its final destination, saving time and storage space.

Custom Builder

The Telegraf custom builder allows you to select specific plugins to include in your Telegraf binary. This capability is practical when using Telegraf on resource-constrained devices. In addition, making any additions or deletions to the binary is a simple edit to the configuration.

Intro to Telegraf video

How to Use Telegraf and Its Plugin Ecosystem

Telegraf plugin system overview

4 Types of Telegraf Plugins

There are the four basic plugin types: Input, Output, processor, and aggregator.

1. Input

Telegraf Input Plugins collect metrics from the system, services, and 3rd party APIs.

2. Process

Processor Plugins transform, decorate, and filter metrics before they are sent allowing your data to be sanitized as it arrives.

3. Aggregate

Aggregator Plugins create aggregate metrics, for example the average mean, minimum, and maximum from the metrics you have collected, and processed.

4. Output

Output Plugins write to a variety of datastores, services, & message queues, like InfluxDB, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Datadog, Kafka, MQTT, NSQ, and others.

Video: Telegraf Plugin System Overview

Telegraf plugins

Integrations to a variety of metrics, events, and logs from popular containers and systems.

Telegraf also has output plugins to send metrics to a variety of other datastores, services, and message queues, including InfluxDB, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Datadog, Librato, Kafka, MQTT, NSQ, and many others.

Seamlessly connect with 300+ plugins to the platforms that make sense to you.