Telegraf Permission Issue on Raspberry Pi – Unable to Start

Telegraf
1

I recently installed Telegraf (version Telegraf 1.34.1) on my Raspberry Pi and tried to start it using:

sudo systemctl start telegraf

However, when I check its status, I see that the service has failed to start:

sudo systemctl status telegraf

telegraf.service - Telegraf
Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/telegraf.service; enabled; p>
Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Thu 2025-03-27 15:47:41>
Duration: 79ms
Docs: GitHub - influxdata/telegraf: Agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics, logs, and other arbitrary data.
Process: 3012 ExecStart=/usr/bin/telegraf -config /etc/telegraf/t>
Main PID: 3012 (code=exited, status=2)
CPU: 100ms

Mar 27 15:47:41 pi5-pune-06 systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Scheduled r>
Mar 27 15:47:41 pi5-pune-06 systemd[1]: Stopped telegraf.service - Te>
Mar 27 15:47:41 pi5-pune-06 systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Start reque>
Mar 27 15:47:41 pi5-pune-06 systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Failed with>
Mar 27 15:47:41 pi5-pune-06 systemd[1]: Failed to start telegraf.serv>

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image1898×362 86.1 KB

telegraf.conf

# Global tags to identify the Raspberry Pi in InfluxDB
[global_tags]
  device = "raspberry_pi_06"  # Tag to identify this device (for easy identification in InfluxDB)
  location = "office"           # Specify the location of the device (optional)
  environment = "dev"         # Add an environment tag to distinguish between dev, prod, etc. (optional)

# Telegraf agent configuration
[agent]
  interval = "60s"            # How often to gather metrics (every 60 seconds)
  flush_interval = "10s"      # Interval to flush data to InfluxDB (every 10 seconds)
  hostname = "pi5-pune-06"    # Hostname of the Raspberry Pi (useful for identifying the device)
  buffer_strategy = "disk"
  metric_buffer_limit = 0 

[[outputs.influxdb_v2]]
  urls = <influx_db_url>
  token = <inlflux_db_token>
  organization = "organization"
  bucket = "bucket" 

# Input plugins: System metrics
[[inputs.cpu]]
  percpu = true        # Collect CPU usage for each individual core (useful for multi-core systems)
  totalcpu = true      # Collect total CPU usage (overall CPU usage)

[[inputs.mem]]
  # Collect system memory usage, including total, used, and free memory statistics.

[[inputs.disk]]
  ignore_fs = ["tmpfs", "devtmpfs"]  # Exclude temporary filesystems from disk usage metrics
  mount_points = ["/", "/boot"]      # Focus on the root ("/") and boot partitions for disk metrics

[[inputs.net]]
  interfaces = ["eth0", "wlan0"]  # Collect network statistics from both Ethernet (eth0) and Wi-Fi (wlan0) interfaces

When I do sudo journalctl -u telegraf -f
I am getting

Mar 27 17:36:28 pi5-06 telegraf[3465]: main.main()
Mar 27 17:36:28 pi5-06 telegraf[3465]: /go/src/github.com/influxdata/telegraf/cmd/telegraf/main.go:414 +0xf0
Mar 27 17:36:28 pi5-06 systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=2/INVALIDARGUMENT
Mar 27 17:36:28 pi5-06 systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Killing process 3478 (dbus-daemon) with signal SIGKILL.
Mar 27 17:36:28 pi5-06 systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Failed with result ‘exit-code’.
Mar 27 17:36:28 pi5-pune-06 systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Scheduled restart job, restart counter is at 5.
Mar 27 17:36:28 pi5-06 systemd[1]: Stopped telegraf.service - Telegraf.
Mar 27 17:36:28 pi5-06 systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Start request repeated too quickly.
Mar 27 17:36:28 pi5-06 systemd[1]: telegraf.service: Failed with result ‘exit-code’.
Mar 27 17:36:28 pi5-06 systemd[1]: Failed to start telegraf.service - Telegraf.

2

This very well could just be our setup, but why in your process do you have it starting with a config file and also a config directory? You can just put that config file inside the directory also. What is the $telegraf variable at the end of that same command supposed to do? My guess is that it is failing and you have a auto restart that keeps trying to hit it even though it is failing each time. Try running the startup command outside of a service and see what the error is.

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