Apache Zookeeper and InfluxDB Integration

Input and output integration overview

The Zookeeper Telegraf plugin collects and reports metrics from Zookeeper servers, facilitating monitoring and performance analysis. It utilizes the ‘mntr’ command output to gather essential statistics critical for maintaining Zookeeper’s operational health.

The InfluxDB plugin writes metrics to the InfluxDB HTTP service, allowing for efficient storage and retrieval of time series data.

Integration details

Apache Zookeeper

The Zookeeper plugin for Telegraf is designed to collect vital statistics from Zookeeper servers by executing the ‘mntr’ command. This plugin serves as a monitoring tool that captures important metrics related to Zookeeper’s performance, including connection details, latency, and various operational statistics, facilitating the assessment of the health and efficiency of Zookeeper deployments. In contrast to the Prometheus input plugin, which is recommended when the Prometheus metrics provider is enabled, the Zookeeper plugin accesses raw output from the ‘mntr’ command, rendering it tailored for configurations that do not adopt Prometheus for metrics reporting. This unique approach allows administrators to gather Java Properties formatted metrics directly from Zookeeper, ensuring comprehensive visibility into Zookeeper’s operational state and enabling timely responses to performance anomalies. It specifically excels in environments where Zookeeper operates as a centralized service for maintaining configuration information and names for distributed systems, thus providing immeasurable insights essential for troubleshooting and capacity planning.

InfluxDB

The InfluxDB Telegraf plugin serves to send metrics to the InfluxDB HTTP API, facilitating the storage and query of time series data in a structured manner. Integrating seamlessly with InfluxDB, this plugin provides essential features such as token-based authentication and support for multiple InfluxDB cluster nodes, ensuring reliable and scalable data ingestion. Through its configurability, users can specify options like organization, destination buckets, and HTTP-specific settings, providing flexibility to tailor how data is sent and stored. The plugin also supports secret management for sensitive data, which enhances security in production environments. This plugin is particularly beneficial in modern observability stacks where real-time analytics and storage of time series data are crucial.

Configuration

Apache Zookeeper

[[inputs.zookeeper]]
  ## An array of address to gather stats about. Specify an ip or hostname
  ## with port. ie localhost:2181, 10.0.0.1:2181, etc.

  ## If no servers are specified, then localhost is used as the host.
  ## If no port is specified, 2181 is used
  servers = [":2181"]

  ## Timeout for metric collections from all servers. Minimum timeout is "1s".
  # timeout = "5s"

  ## Float Parsing - the initial implementation forced any value unable to be
  ## parsed as an int to be a string. Setting this to "float" will attempt to
  ## parse float values as floats and not strings. This would break existing
  ## metrics and may cause issues if a value switches between a float and int.
  # parse_floats = "string"

  ## Optional TLS Config
  # enable_tls = false
  # tls_ca = "/etc/telegraf/ca.pem"
  # tls_cert = "/etc/telegraf/cert.pem"
  # tls_key = "/etc/telegraf/key.pem"
  ## If false, skip chain & host verification
  # insecure_skip_verify = true

InfluxDB

[[outputs.influxdb]]
  ## The full HTTP or UDP URL for your InfluxDB instance.
  ##
  ## Multiple URLs can be specified for a single cluster, only ONE of the
  ## urls will be written to each interval.
  # urls = ["unix:///var/run/influxdb.sock"]
  # urls = ["udp://127.0.0.1:8089"]
  # urls = ["http://127.0.0.1:8086"]

  ## Local address to bind when connecting to the server
  ## If empty or not set, the local address is automatically chosen.
  # local_address = ""

  ## The target database for metrics; will be created as needed.
  ## For UDP url endpoint database needs to be configured on server side.
  # database = "telegraf"

  ## The value of this tag will be used to determine the database.  If this
  ## tag is not set the 'database' option is used as the default.
  # database_tag = ""

  ## If true, the 'database_tag' will not be included in the written metric.
  # exclude_database_tag = false

  ## If true, no CREATE DATABASE queries will be sent.  Set to true when using
  ## Telegraf with a user without permissions to create databases or when the
  ## database already exists.
  # skip_database_creation = false

  ## Name of existing retention policy to write to.  Empty string writes to
  ## the default retention policy.  Only takes effect when using HTTP.
  # retention_policy = ""

  ## The value of this tag will be used to determine the retention policy.  If this
  ## tag is not set the 'retention_policy' option is used as the default.
  # retention_policy_tag = ""

  ## If true, the 'retention_policy_tag' will not be included in the written metric.
  # exclude_retention_policy_tag = false

  ## Write consistency (clusters only), can be: "any", "one", "quorum", "all".
  ## Only takes effect when using HTTP.
  # write_consistency = "any"

  ## Timeout for HTTP messages.
  # timeout = "5s"

  ## HTTP Basic Auth
  # username = "telegraf"
  # password = "metricsmetricsmetricsmetrics"

  ## HTTP User-Agent
  # user_agent = "telegraf"

  ## UDP payload size is the maximum packet size to send.
  # udp_payload = "512B"

  ## Optional TLS Config for use on HTTP connections.
  # tls_ca = "/etc/telegraf/ca.pem"
  # tls_cert = "/etc/telegraf/cert.pem"
  # tls_key = "/etc/telegraf/key.pem"
  ## Use TLS but skip chain & host verification
  # insecure_skip_verify = false

  ## HTTP Proxy override, if unset values the standard proxy environment
  ## variables are consulted to determine which proxy, if any, should be used.
  # http_proxy = "http://corporate.proxy:3128"

  ## Additional HTTP headers
  # http_headers = {"X-Special-Header" = "Special-Value"}

  ## HTTP Content-Encoding for write request body, can be set to "gzip" to
  ## compress body or "identity" to apply no encoding.
  # content_encoding = "gzip"

  ## When true, Telegraf will output unsigned integers as unsigned values,
  ## i.e.: "42u".  You will need a version of InfluxDB supporting unsigned
  ## integer values.  Enabling this option will result in field type errors if
  ## existing data has been written.
  # influx_uint_support = false

  ## When true, Telegraf will omit the timestamp on data to allow InfluxDB
  ## to set the timestamp of the data during ingestion. This is generally NOT
  ## what you want as it can lead to data points captured at different times
  ## getting omitted due to similar data.
  # influx_omit_timestamp = false

Input and output integration examples

Apache Zookeeper

1. Cluster Health Monitoring: Integrate the Zookeeper plugin to monitor the health and performance of a distributed application relying on Zookeeper for configuration management and service discovery. By tracking metrics such as session count, latency, and data size, DevOps teams can identify potential issues before they escalate, ensuring high availability and reliability across applications.

2. Performance Benchmarks: Utilize the plugin to benchmark Zookeeper performance in varying workload scenarios. This not only helps in understanding how Zookeeper behaves under load but also assists in tuning configurations to optimize throughput and reduce latency during peak operations.

3. Alerting for Anomalies: Combine this plugin with alerting tools to create a proactive monitoring system that notifies engineers if specific Zookeeper metrics exceed threshold limits, such as open file descriptor counts or high latency values. This enables teams to respond promptly to issues that could impact service reliability.

4. Historical Data Analysis: Store the metrics collected by the Zookeeper plugin in a time-series database to analyze historical performance trends. This allows teams to evaluate the impact of changes over time, assess the effectiveness of scaling actions, and plan for future capacity needs.

InfluxDB

1. Real-Time System Monitoring: Utilize the InfluxDB plugin to capture and store metrics from a range of system components, such as CPU usage, memory consumption, and disk I/O. By pushing these metrics into InfluxDB, you can create a live dashboard that visualizes system performance in real time. This setup not only helps in identifying performance bottlenecks but also assists in proactive capacity planning by analyzing trends over time.

2. Performance Tracking for Web Applications: Automatically gather and push metrics related to web application performance, such as request durations, error rates, and user interactions, to InfluxDB. By employing this plugin in your monitoring stack, you can use the stored metrics to generate reports and analyses that help understand user behavior and application efficiency, thus guiding development and optimization efforts.

3. IoT Data Aggregation: Leverage the InfluxDB Telegraf plugin to collect sensor data from various IoT devices and store it in a centralized InfluxDB instance. This use case enables you to analyze trends and patterns in environmental or machine data over time, facilitating smarter decisions and predictive maintenance strategies. By integrating IoT data into InfluxDB, organizations can harness the power of historical data analysis to drive innovation and operational efficiency.

4. Analyzing Historical Metrics for Forecasting: Set up the InfluxDB plugin to send historical metric data into InfluxDB and use it to drive forecasting models. By analyzing past performance metrics, you can create predictive models that forecast future trends and demands. This application is particularly useful for business intelligence purposes, helping organizations prepare for fluctuations in resource needs based on historical usage patterns.

Feedback

Thank you for being part of our community! If you have any general feedback or found any bugs on these pages, we welcome and encourage your input. Please submit your feedback in the InfluxDB community Slack.