Framework to compose e.g. telegraf.conf from snippets?

Telegraf
1

Hi,

I am searching for some framework, where I have e.g. telegraf.conf snippets and would like to create hardware/board/container-specific telegraf.conf files out of those.
I guess I could create my own .conf parser and add the snippets, but also I guess I am not the only person on this planet who has this problem.

I figured out that I can load telegraf.conf either from a file or from some web server or git repo with web interface, but it’s a bit annoying to update each and every telegraf.conf file manually when I want a change.

How do you normally do something like that?

Are there tools you would recommend for this job?

Regards,

Robert

2

Hello @ReliableEmbeddedSys,
I don’t know if I have a good solution for you of the top of my head. That being said I just want to double check that you’re aware of the following tools/commands:

Run telegraf, enabling specific plugins:

telegraf --config telegraf.conf --input-filter cpu:mem --output-filter influxdb

Run telegraf with env var

[agent]
    interval = "${env var}"

Finally this presentation is really good to learn all about telegraf and helpful hints and tools you might not be aware of

3

@ReliableEmbeddedSys,
I am sharing your question with the telegraf team though and I hope they can provide you with a better solution.

4

Thanks for the answer.

The use case is slightly different.

Take a telegraf.conf file and cut it in small pieces (some of them host specific, others are reused on various hosts) and reassemble them to a telegraf.conf file.

I saw that I can load the config from some web server as well and could probably compose the configs somehow on the server side.

I am just wondering how people usually do that, since I guess also others will reuse parts of their telegraf.conf files on various machines.

5

I’m not quite sure yet how your deployment path looks like.
Basically the following ideas would come to my mind:

  • Use a DevOps tool, these usually bring powerful template engines with them. I would use Ansible, which works under the hood with the jinja2 engine, since it is written in Python. But other tools like Chef, Puppet etc. work as well.
  • Write your own config generator script that uses the jinja2 template engine for example. Or a template engine in a programming language of your choice. Or use the sed/awk tools for this.
1 Like