StatsD and Thanos Integration

Input and output integration overview

<p>The StatsD input plugin captures metrics from a StatsD server by running a listener service in the background, allowing for comprehensive performance monitoring and metric aggregation.</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

StatsD

<p>The StatsD input plugin is designed to gather metrics from a StatsD server by running a backgrounded StatsD listener service while Telegraf is active. This plugin leverages the format of the StatsD messages as established by the original Etsy implementation, which allows for various types of metrics including gauges, counters, sets, timings, histograms, and distributions. The capabilities of the StatsD plugin extend to parsing tags and extending the standard protocol with features that accommodate InfluxDB’s tagging system. It can handle messages sent via different protocols (UDP or TCP), manage multiple metric metrics effectively, and offers advanced configurations for optimal metric handling such as percentiles calculation and data transformation templates. This flexibility empowers users to track application performance comprehensively, making it an essential tool for robust monitoring setups.</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

StatsD

Thanos

Input and output integration examples

StatsD

<ol> <li> <p><strong>Real-time Application Performance Monitoring</strong>: Utilize the StatsD input plugin to monitor application performance metrics in real-time. By configuring your application to send various metrics to a StatsD server, teams can leverage this plugin to analyze performance bottlenecks, track user activity, and ensure resource optimization dynamically. The combination of historical and real-time metrics allows for proactive troubleshooting and enhances the responsiveness of issue resolution processes.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Tracking User Engagement Metrics in Web Applications</strong>: Use the StatsD plugin to gather user engagement statistics, such as page views, click events, and interaction times. By sending these metrics to the StatsD server, businesses can derive valuable insights into user behavior, enabling them to make data-driven decisions to improve user experience and interface design based on quantitative feedback. This can significantly enhance the effectiveness of marketing strategies and product development efforts.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Infrastructure Health Monitoring</strong>: Deploy the StatsD plugin to monitor the health of your server infrastructure by tracking metrics such as resource utilization, server response times, and network performance. With this setup, DevOps teams can gain detailed visibility into system performance, effectively anticipating issues before they escalate. This enables a proactive approach to infrastructure management, minimizing downtimes and ensuring optimal service delivery.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Creating Comprehensive Service Dashboards</strong>: Integrate StatsD with visualization tools to create comprehensive dashboards that reflect the status and health of services across an architecture. For instance, combining data from multiple services logged through StatsD can transform raw metrics into actionable insights, showcasing system performance trends over time. This capability empowers stakeholders to maintain oversight and drive decisions based on visualized data sets, enhancing overall operational transparency.</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>

Feedback

Thank you for being part of our community! If you have any general feedback or found any bugs on these pages, we welcome and encourage your input. Please submit your feedback in the InfluxDB community Slack.