HTTP and Cortex Integration

Input and output integration overview

<p>The HTTP plugin allows for the collection of metrics from specified HTTP endpoints, handling various data formats and authentication methods.</p>

<p>This plugin enables Telegraf to send metrics to Cortex using the Prometheus remote write protocol, allowing seamless ingestion into Cortex’s scalable, multi-tenant time series storage.</p>

Integration details

HTTP

<p>The HTTP plugin collects metrics from one or more HTTP(S) endpoints, which should have metrics formatted in one of the supported input data formats. It also supports secrets from secret-stores for various authentication options and includes globally supported configuration settings.</p>

Cortex

<p>With Telegraf’s HTTP output plugin and the <code>prometheusremotewrite</code> data format you can send metrics directly to Cortex, a horizontally scalable, long-term storage backend for Prometheus. Cortex supports multi-tenancy and accepts remote write requests using the Prometheus protobuf format. By using Telegraf as the collection agent and Remote Write as the transport mechanism, organizations can extend observability into sources not natively supported by Prometheus—such as Windows hosts, SNMP-enabled devices, or custom application metrics—while leveraging Cortex’s high-availability and long-retention capabilities.</p>

Configuration

HTTP

Cortex

Input and output integration examples

HTTP

<ol> <li><strong>Collecting Metrics from Localhost:</strong> The plugin can fetch metrics from an HTTP endpoint like <code>http://localhost/metrics</code>, allowing for easy local monitoring.</li> <li><strong>Using Unix Domain Sockets:</strong> You can specify metrics collection from services over Unix domain sockets by using the http+unix scheme, for example, <code>http+unix:///path/to/service.sock:/api/endpoint</code>.</li> </ol>

Cortex

<ol> <li> <p><strong>Unified Multi-Tenant Monitoring</strong>: Use Telegraf to collect metrics from different teams or environments and push them to Cortex with separate <code>X-Scope-OrgID</code> headers. This enables isolated data ingestion and querying per tenant, ideal for managed services and platform teams.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Extending Prometheus Coverage to Edge Devices</strong>: Deploy Telegraf on edge or IoT devices to collect system metrics and send them to a centralized Cortex cluster. This approach ensures consistent observability even for environments without local Prometheus scrapers.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Global Service Observability with Federated Tenants</strong>: Aggregate metrics from global infrastructure by configuring Telegraf agents to push data into regional Cortex clusters, each tagged with tenant identifiers. Cortex handles deduplication and centralized access across regions.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Custom App Telemetry Pipeline</strong>: Collect app-specific telemetry via Telegraf’s <code>exec</code> or <code>http</code> input plugins and forward it to Cortex. This allows DevOps teams to monitor app-specific KPIs in a scalable, query-efficient format while keeping metrics logically grouped by tenant or service.</p> </li> </ol>

Feedback

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