Documentation forSolarWinds Observability

Monitor with Telegraf

Telegraf is an open-source server agent used to collect and transmit metrics and events from various sources, such as databases, systems, and IoT sensors.

Telegraf-based integrations in SolarWinds Observability use Telegraf input plugins to monitor different technologies, such as FluentD or Nginx. Before the data is sent to SolarWinds Observability, it is transformed to the OTel format by using Telegraf's opentelemetry output plugin.

During the transformation to the OTel format, some data might be lost. For example, whereas Telegraf supports string values for datapoints, OTel does not support them. As a result, some metrics, such as status for HAProxy, currently cannot be monitored with SolarWinds Observability because they are not included in the transformed OTel data.

For most Telegraf integrations, an entity is created in SolarWinds Observability. See Telegraf plugin directory for details.

Many collected metrics are displayed as widgets in pre-built entity details views specific for the integration. In Entity Explorer, search for an integration name and click the entity to display the details view.

To see the metrics in Metrics Explorer, type the metric name in Metrics Explorer search box.

Full Telegraf-based integrations

When you integrate the following plugins with SolarWinds Observability, an entity is created. You have full observability into the monitored platform.

  • Fluentd: gathers fluentd server metrics from the plugin endpoint provided by the in_monitor plugin.

  • HAProxy: gathers metrics directly from any running HAproxy instance, for example using CSV generated by the HAproxy status page or from admin sockets.

  • NGINX Plus API: monitors the health of your NGINX Plus service(s) over ngx_http_api_module.

  • NTPQ: gathers standard NTP query metrics, it requires an ntpq executable.

  • Varnish: gathers stats from Varnish HTTP Cache.

    See Configure Telegraf integrations for details.

Telegraf-based integration without an entity

  • StatsD: runs a backgrounded statsd listener service while Telegraf is running. StatsD is a data forwarder, therefore there is no entity created for this integration. There are no default metrics; you need to configure metrics to monitor.

    See Configure StatsD integration for details.

Manual Telegraf configuration

You can install and configure Telegraf manually to send data to SolarWinds Observability, for example for Telegraf inputs that are not available in the Add integration wizard yet. When you configure sending Telegraf data this way, no entities are created in SolarWinds Observability. The ingested data is available in the Metrics Explorer and can be added to custom dashboards.

See Configure Telegraf manually for details.