VMware vSphere and AWS Timestream Integration

Input and output integration overview

<p>The VMware vSphere Telegraf plugin provides a means to collect metrics from VMware vCenter servers, allowing for comprehensive monitoring and management of virtual resources in a vSphere environment.</p>

<p>The AWS Timestream Telegraf plugin enables users to send metrics directly to Amazon’s Timestream service, which is designed for time series data management. This plugin offers a variety of configuration options for authentication, data organization, and retention settings.</p> <p>With the coming End of Life of AWS Timestream for LiveAnalytics, you can easily switch to AWS Timestream for InfluxDB or other verions of InfluxDB hosted on AWS by using the <a href="https://www.influxdata.com/integrations/influxdb/">InfluxDB Telegraf plugin</a>. Learn more about <a href="https://www.influxdata.com/influxdb-cloud-on-aws/">AWS and InfluxDB</a></p>

Integration details

VMware vSphere

<p>This plugin connects to VMware vSphere servers to gather a variety of metrics from virtual environments, enabling efficient monitoring and management of virtual resources. It interfaces with the vSphere API to collect statistics regarding clusters, hosts, resource pools, VMs, datastores, and vSAN entities, presenting them in a format suitable for analysis and visualization. The plugin is particularly valuable for administrators who manage VMware-based infrastructures, as it helps to track system performance, resource usage, and operational issues in real-time. By aggregating data from multiple sources, the plugin empowers users with insights that facilitate informed decision-making regarding resource allocation, troubleshooting, and ensuring optimal system performance. Additionally, the support for secret-store integration allows secure handling of sensitive credentials, promoting best practices in security and compliance assessments.</p>

AWS Timestream

<p>This plugin is designed to efficiently write metrics to Amazon’s Timestream for LiveAnalytics service. With AWS no longer accepting new users for their LiveAnalytics service, consider using the <a href="https://www.influxdata.com/integrations/influxdb/">InfluxDB plugin</a> with AWS Timestream for InfluxDB or other <a href="https://www.influxdata.com/influxdb-cloud-on-aws/">InfluxDB options available on AWS</a>. This plugin Telegraf can send data collected from various sources and supports a flexible configuration for authentication, data organization, and retention management. It utilizes a credential chain for authentication, allowing various methods such as web identity, assumed roles, and shared profiles. Users can define how metrics are organized in Timestream—whether to use a single table or multiple tables, alongside control over aspect such as retention periods for both magnetic and memory stores. A key feature is its ability to handle multi-measure records, enabling efficient data ingestion and helping to reduce the overhead of multiple writes. In terms of error handling, the plugin includes mechanisms for addressing common issues related to AWS errors during data writes, such as retry logic for throttling and the ability to create tables as needed.</p>

Configuration

VMware vSphere

AWS Timestream

Input and output integration examples

VMware vSphere

<ol> <li> <p><strong>Dynamic Resource Allocation</strong>: Utilize this plugin to monitor resource usage across a fleet of VMs and automatically adjust resource allocations based on performance metrics. This scenario could involve triggering scaling actions in real time based on CPU and memory usage metrics collected from the vSphere API, ensuring optimal performance and cost-efficiency.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Capacity Planning and Forecasting</strong>: Leverage the historical metrics gathered from vSphere to conduct capacity planning. Analyzing the trends of CPU, memory, and storage usage over time helps administrators anticipate when additional resources will be needed, avoiding outages and ensuring that the virtual infrastructure can handle growth.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Automated Alerting and Incident Response</strong>: Integrate this plugin with alerting tools to set up automated notifications based on the metrics gathered. For example, if the CPU usage on a host exceeds a specified threshold, it could trigger alerts and automatically initiate predefined remediation steps, such as migrating VMs to less utilized hosts.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Performance Benchmarking Across Clusters</strong>: Use the metrics collected to compare the performance of clusters in different vCenters. This benchmarking provides insights into which cluster configurations yield the best resource efficiency and can guide future infrastructure enhancements.</p> </li> </ol>

AWS Timestream

<ol> <li> <p><strong>IoT Data Metrics</strong>: Use the Timestream plugin to send real-time metrics from IoT devices to Timestream, allowing for quick analysis and visualization of sensor data. By organizing device readings into a time series format, users can track trends, identify anomalies, and streamline operational decisions based on device performance.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Application Performance Monitoring</strong>: Leverage Timestream alongside application monitoring tools to send metrics about service performance over time. This integration enables engineers to perform historical analysis of application performance, correlate it with business metrics, and optimize resource allocation based on usage patterns viewed over time.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Automated Data Archiving</strong>: Configure the Timestream plugin to write data to Timestream while simultaneously managing retention periods. This setup can automate archiving strategies, ensuring that older data is preserved according to predefined criteria. This is especially useful for compliance and historical analysis, allowing businesses to maintain their data lifecycle with minimal manual intervention.</p> </li> <li> <p><strong>Multi-Application Metrics Aggregation</strong>: Utilize the Timestream plugin to aggregate metrics from multiple applications into Timestream. By creating a unified database of performance metrics, organizations can gain holistic insights across various services, improving visibility into system-wide performance and facilitating cross-application troubleshooting.</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.