What is Telegraf?
Telegraf is a plugin-driven server agent for collecting and sending 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.
Why use Telegraf?
Collect and send all kinds of data:
- Database: Connect to datasources like MongoDB, MySQL, Redis, and others to collect and send metrics.
- Systems: Collect metrics from your modern stack of cloud platforms, containers, and orchestrators.
- IoT sensors: Collect critical stateful data (pressure levels, temp levels, etc.) from IoT sensors and devices.
Agent: Telegraf can collect metrics from a wide array of inputs and write them into a wide array of outputs. It is plugin-driven for both collection and output of data so it is easily extendable. It is written in Go, which means that it is a compiled and standalone binary that can be executed on any system with no need for external dependencies, no npm, pip, gem, or other package management tools required.
Coverage: With 200+ plugins already written by subject matter experts on the data in the community, it is easy to start collecting metrics from your end-points. Even better, the ease of plugin development means you can build your own plugin to fit with your monitoring needs. You can even use Telegraf to parse the input data formats into metrics. These include: InfluxDB Line Protocol, JSON, Graphite, Value, Nagios, and Collectd.
Flexible: The Telegraf plugin architecture supports your processes and does not force you to change your workflows to work with the technology. Whether you need it to sit on the edge, or in a centralized manner, it just fits with your architecture instead of the other way around. Telegraf’s flexibility makes it an easy decision to implement.
Telegraf integrations
Telegraf’s plugin system allows new inputs and outputs to be easily added, with many integrations to a variety of metrics, events, and logs from popular containers and systems. Pull metrics from third-party APIs, or listen for metrics via a StatsD and Kafka consumer services.
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.
What’s next?
Getting Started: Writing Data to InfluxDB
Getting Started: Streaming Data into InfluxDB
Writing Your Own Telegraf Plugin
EXTENDING TELEGRAF
Writing Your Own Telegraf Plugin
In this video you will be walked through the steps on how to write your own Telegraf plugin. This will require an understanding of the Go programming language.
The Telegraf Toolbelt: It Can Do That, Really?
In this talk David McKay, DevRel Manager at InfluxData, will take a look at some of the lesser known, but awesome, plugins that are often overlooked; as well as how to use Telegraf for monitoring of Cloud Native systems.
Available as InfluxDB open source, InfluxDB Cloud & InfluxDB Enterprise