NSQ and Cortex Integration

Input and output integration overview

<p>The NSQ Telegraf plugin reads metrics from the NSQD messaging system, allowing for real-time data processing and monitoring.</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

NSQ

<p>The NSQ plugin interfaces with NSQ, a real-time messaging platform, enabling the reading of messages from NSQD. This plugin is categorized as a service plugin, meaning it actively listens for metrics and events rather than polling them at regular intervals. With an emphasis on reliability, it prevents data loss by tracking undelivered messages until they are acknowledged by outputs. The plugin allows for configurations such as specifying NSQLookupd endpoints, topics, and channels, and it supports multiple data formats for flexibility in data handling.</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

NSQ

Cortex

Input and output integration examples

NSQ

<ol> <li> <p><strong>Real-Time Analytics Dashboard</strong>: Integrate this plugin with a visualization tool to create a dashboard that displays real-time metrics from various topics in NSQ. By subscribing to specific topics, users can monitor system health and application performance dynamically, allowing for immediate insights and timely responses to any anomalies.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Event-Driven Automation</strong>: Combine NSQ with a serverless architecture to trigger automated workflows based on incoming messages. This use case could involve processing data for machine learning models or responding to user actions in applications, thus streamlining operations and enhancing user experience through rapid processing.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Multi-Service Communication Hub</strong>: Use the NSQ plugin to act as a centralized messaging hub among different microservices in a distributed architecture. By enabling services to communicate through NSQ, developers can ensure reliable message delivery while maintaining decoupled service interactions, significantly improving scalability and resilience.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Metrics Aggregation for Enhanced Monitoring</strong>: Implement the NSQ plugin to aggregate metrics from multiple sources before sending them to an analytics tool. This setup enables businesses to consolidate data from various applications and services, creating a unified view for better decision-making and strategic planning.</p> </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>

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