Starting in Telegraf v1.36.0, the used_percent field reported by the mem input plugin on Linux increased by roughly 6-20% for the same memory state. This was caused by an upstream change in the gopsutil dependency (v4.25.8), which changed the Used memory calculation from Total - Free - Buffers - Cached to Total - Available (using the kernel’s MemAvailable from /proc/meminfo).
The new formula is more accurate as the old one assumed all cached and buffered memory was immediately reclaimable, which is not always the case. Dashboards or alerts based on used_percent thresholds may need adjustment. The raw fields (free, buffered, cached, available, total) are unaffected and can be used to compute either definition in queries.
