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Telegraf - A native agent for InfluxDB

Telegraf is an agent written in Go for collecting metrics from the system it's running on or from other services and writing them into InfluxDB.

Design goals are to have a minimal memory footprint with a plugin system so that developers in the community can easily add support for collecting metrics from well known services (like Hadoop, or Postgres, or Redis) and third party APIs (like Mailchimp, AWS CloudWatch, or Google Analytics).

We'll eagerly accept pull requests for new plugins and will manage the set of plugins that Telegraf supports. See the bottom of this doc for instructions on writing new plugins.

Quickstart

Build from source or download telegraf:

Linux packages for Debian/Ubuntu and RHEL/CentOS:

NOTE: version 0.1.4+ has introduced some breaking changes! A 0.1.4+ telegraf agent is NOT backwards-compatible with a config file from 0.1.3 and below. That being said, the difference is not huge, see below for an example on how to setup the new config file.

As well, due to a breaking change to the InfluxDB integer line-protocol, there are some InfluxDB compatibility requirements:

InfluxDB 0.9.3+ (including nightly builds) requires Telegraf 0.1.5+
InfluxDB 0.9.2 and prior requires Telegraf 0.1.4

Latest:

0.1.4:

OSX via Homebrew:

brew update
brew install telegraf

From Source:

Telegraf manages dependencies via godep, which gets installed via the Makefile if you don't have it already. You also must build with golang version 1.4+

Install Go
Setup your GOPATH
run go get github.com/influxdb/telegraf
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/influxdb/telegraf
run make

How to use it:

Run telegraf -sample-config > telegraf.toml to create an initial configuration
Edit the configuration to match your needs
Run telegraf -config telegraf.toml -test to output one full measurement sample to STDOUT
Run telegraf -config telegraf.toml to gather and send metrics to configured outputs.
Run telegraf -config telegraf.toml -filter system:swap to enable only the system & swap plugins defined in the config.

Telegraf Options

Telegraf has a few options you can configure under the agent section of the config. If you don't see an agent section run telegraf -sample-config > telegraf.toml to create a valid initial configuration:

hostname: The hostname is passed as a tag. By default this will be the value retured by hostname on the machine running Telegraf. You can override that value here.
interval: How ofter to gather metrics. Uses a simple number + unit parser, ie "10s" for 10 seconds or "5m" for 5 minutes.
debug: Set to true to gather and send metrics to STDOUT as well as InfluxDB.

Plugin Options

There are 5 configuration options that are configurable per plugin:

pass: An array of strings that is used to filter metrics generated by the current plugin. Each string in the array is tested as a prefix against metric names and if it matches, the metric is emitted.
drop: The inverse of pass, if a metric name matches, it is not emitted.
tagpass: (added in 0.1.5) tag names and arrays of strings that are used to filter metrics by the current plugin. Each string in the array is tested as an exact match against the tag name, and if it matches the metric is emitted.
tagdrop: (added in 0.1.5) The inverse of tagpass. If a tag matches, the metric is not emitted. This is tested on metrics that have passed the tagpass test.
interval: How often to gather this metric. Normal plugins use a single global interval, but if one particular plugin should be run less or more often, you can configure that here.

Plugin Configuration Examples

This is a full working config that will output CPU data to an InfluxDB instance at 192.168.59.103:8086, tagging measurements with dc="denver-1". It will output measurements at a 10s interval and will collect totalcpu & percpu data.

[tags]
    dc = "denver-1"

[agent]
    interval = "10s"

# OUTPUTS
[outputs]
[outputs.influxdb]
    url = "http://192.168.59.103:8086" # required.
    database = "telegraf" # required.

# PLUGINS
[cpu]
    percpu = true
    totalcpu = true

Below is how to configure tagpass and tagdrop parameters (added in 0.1.5)

# Don't collect CPU data for cpu6 & cpu7
[cpu.tagdrop]
    cpu = [ "cpu6", "cpu7" ]

[disk]
[disk.tagpass]
    # tagpass conditions are OR, not AND.
    # If the (filesystem is ext4 or xfs) OR (the path is /opt or /home)
    # then the metric passes
    fstype = [ "ext4", "xfs" ]
    path = [ "/opt", "/home" ]

Supported Plugins

You can view usage instructions for each plugin by running telegraf -usage <pluginname>

Telegraf currently has support for collecting metrics from

disque
elasticsearch
exec (generic JSON-emitting executable plugin)
haproxy
httpjson (generic JSON-emitting http service plugin)
kafka_consumer
leofs
lustre2
memcached
mongodb
mysql
nginx
postgresql
prometheus
rabbitmq
redis
rethinkdb
system (mem, CPU, load, etc.)

We'll be adding support for many more over the coming months. Read on if you want to add support for another service or third-party API.

Output options

Telegraf also supports specifying multiple output sinks to send data to, configuring each output sink is different, but examples can be found by running telegraf -sample-config

Supported Outputs

influxdb
kafka
datadog

Contributing

Please see the contributing guide for details on contributing a plugin or output to Telegraf

Testing

Execute short tests

execute make test-short

Execute long tests

As Telegraf collects metrics from several third-party services it becomes a difficult task to mock each service as some of them have complicated protocols which would take some time to replicate.

To overcome this situation we've decided to use docker containers to provide a fast and reproducible environment to test those services which require it. For other situations (i.e: https://github.com/influxdb/telegraf/blob/master/plugins/redis/redis_test.go ) a simple mock will suffice.

To execute Telegraf tests follow these simple steps:

Install docker compose following these instructions
- mac users should be able to simply do brew install boot2docker and brew install docker-compose
execute make test

Unit test troubleshooting

Try cleaning up your test environment by executing make test-cleanup and re-running

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