Google Cloud Stackdriver and Thanos Integration

Input and output integration overview

<p>This plugin enables the collection of monitoring data from Google Cloud services through the Stackdriver Monitoring API. It is designed to help users monitor their cloud infrastructure’s performance and health by gathering relevant metrics.</p>

<p>This plugin sends metrics from Telegraf to Thanos using the Prometheus remote write protocol over HTTP, allowing efficient and scalable ingestion into Thanos Receive components.</p>

Integration details

Google Cloud Stackdriver

<p>The Stackdriver Telegraf plugin allows users to query timeseries data from Google Cloud Monitoring using the Cloud Monitoring API v3. With this plugin, users can easily integrate Google Cloud monitoring metrics into their monitoring stacks. This API provides a wealth of insights about resources and applications running in Google Cloud, including performance, uptime, and operational metrics. The plugin supports various configuration options to filter and refine the data retrieved, enabling users to customize their monitoring setup according to their specific needs. This integration facilitates a smoother experience in maintaining the health and performance of cloud resources and assists teams in making data-driven decisions based on historical and current performance statistics.</p>

Thanos

<p>Telegraf’s HTTP plugin can send metrics directly to Thanos via its Remote Write-compatible Receive component. By setting the data format to <code>prometheusremotewrite</code>, Telegraf can serialize metrics into the same protobuf-based format used by native Prometheus clients. This setup enables high-throughput, low-latency metric ingestion into Thanos, facilitating centralized observability at scale. It is particularly useful in hybrid environments where Telegraf is collecting metrics from systems outside Prometheus’ native reach, such as SNMP devices, Windows hosts, or custom apps, and streams them directly to Thanos for long-term storage and global querying.</p>

Configuration

Google Cloud Stackdriver

Thanos

Input and output integration examples

Google Cloud Stackdriver

<ol> <li> <p><strong>Integrating Cloud Metrics into Custom Dashboards</strong>: With this plugin, teams can funnel metrics from Google Cloud into personalized dashboards, allowing for real-time monitoring of application performance and resource utilization. By customizing the visual representation of cloud metrics, operations teams can easily identify trends and anomalies, enabling proactive management before issues escalate.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Automated Alerts and Analysis</strong>: Users can set up automated alerting mechanisms leveraging the plugin’s metrics to track resource thresholds. This capability allows teams to act swiftly in response to performance degradation or outages by providing immediate notifications, thus reducing the mean time to recovery and ensuring continued operational efficiency.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Cross-Platform Resource Comparison</strong>: The plugin can be used to draw metrics from various Google Cloud services and compare them with on-premise resources. This cross-platform visibility helps organizations make informed decisions about resource allocation and scaling strategies, as well as optimize cloud spending versus on-premise infrastructure.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Historical Data Analysis for Capacity Planning</strong>: By collecting historical metrics over time, the plugin empowers teams to conduct thorough capacity planning. Understanding past performance trends facilitates accurate forecasting for resource needs, leading to better budgeting and investment strategies.</p> </li> </ol>

Thanos

<ol> <li> <p><strong>Agentless Cloud Monitoring</strong>: Deploy Telegraf agents across cloud VMs to collect system and application metrics, then stream them directly into Thanos using Remote Write. This provides centralized observability without requiring Prometheus nodes at each location.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Scalable Windows Host Monitoring</strong>: Use Telegraf on Windows machines to collect OS-level metrics and send them via Remote Write to Thanos Receive. This enables observability across heterogeneous environments with native Prometheus support only on Linux.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Cross-Region Metrics Federation</strong>: Telegraf agents in multiple geographic regions can push data to region-local Thanos Receivers using this plugin. From there, Thanos can deduplicate and query metrics globally, reducing latency and network egress costs.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Integrating Third-Party Data into Thanos</strong>: Collect metrics from custom telemetry sources such as REST APIs or proprietary logs using Telegraf inputs and forward them to Thanos via Remote Write. This brings non-native data into a Prometheus-compatible, long-term analytics pipeline.</p> </li> </ol>

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