Telegraf Custom Plugins

Hi,

I want to create a custom plugin for Telegraf but couldn’t understand how to integrate it with my existing version of Telegraf that is already running (installed from Binary). For custom plugins, do I need to build Telegraf from source code after placing the Plugin files ?

I am new to Telegraf and Influx DB, would really appreciate some pointers here.
Thanks
Akanksha

The easiest way is to just use the inputs.exec input. Telegraf has the ability to run any scripts or binaries you want. There are a couple different output formats that telegraf accepts. I have a simple script that just returns the count of specific processes running on each server. It outputs the data in the influx format:

In /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/myownmonitor.conf

[[inputs.exec]]
  commands = [ "/opt/telegraf/scripts/procmon.sh crond rsyslogd sshd snmpd winbindd" ]
  timeout = "5s"
  data_format = "influx"

Output looks like so:
$ /opt/telegraf/scripts/procmon.sh crond rsyslogd sshd snmpd winbindd

procmon,process=crond count=1
procmon,process=rsyslogd count=1
procmon,process=sshd count=3
procmon,process=snmpd count=1
procmon,process=winbindd count=3

Then I have a kapacitor script that alerts if count=0.

If you want to write a custom plugin, you will need to build Telegraf from source after writing your code. You can find more information about how to do that in this blog post.

Thanks a lot for the response! I tried this one and it worked. Thanks once again!