Apache Zookeeper and ServiceNow 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.

This output plugin streams metrics from Telegraf directly to a ServiceNow MID Server via HTTP, leveraging the nowmetric serializer for efficient integration with ServiceNow’s Operational Intelligence and Event Management.

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.

ServiceNow

Telegraf can be used to send metric data directly to a ServiceNow MID Server REST endpoint. Metrics are formatted either using ServiceNow’s Operational Intelligence (OI) format or JSONv2 format, enabling seamless integration with ServiceNow’s Event Management and Operational Intelligence platforms. The serializer batches metrics efficiently, reducing network overhead by minimizing the number of HTTP POST requests. This integration allows users to quickly leverage metrics in ServiceNow for enhanced observability, proactive incident management, and performance monitoring, with ServiceNow’s operational intelligence capabilities.

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

ServiceNow

[[outputs.http]]
  ## ServiceNow MID Server metrics endpoint
  url = "http://mid-server.example.com:9082/api/mid/sa/metrics"

  ## HTTP request method
  method = "POST"

  ## Basic Authentication credentials
  username = "evt.integration"
  password = "P@$$w0rd!"

  ## Data serialization format for ServiceNow
  data_format = "nowmetric"

  ## Metric format type: "oi" (default) or "jsonv2"
  nowmetric_format = "oi"

  ## HTTP Headers
  [outputs.http.headers]
    Content-Type = "application/json"
    Accept = "application/json"

  ## Optional timeout
  # timeout = "5s"

  ## TLS configuration options
  # tls_ca = "/etc/telegraf/ca.pem"
  # tls_cert = "/etc/telegraf/cert.pem"
  # tls_key = "/etc/telegraf/key.pem"
  # insecure_skip_verify = 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.

ServiceNow

1. Proactive Incident Management: Utilize the Telegraf and ServiceNow integration to stream infrastructure and application metrics in real-time to ServiceNow Event Management. Automatically trigger incidents or remediation workflows based on thresholds, significantly reducing incident detection and response times.

2. End-to-End Application Monitoring: Deploy Telegraf agents across multiple layers of an application stack, sending performance metrics directly into ServiceNow. Leveraging ServiceNow’s Operational Intelligence, teams can correlate metrics across components, quickly identifying performance bottlenecks.

3. Dynamic CI Performance Tracking: Integrate Telegraf metrics with ServiceNow’s CMDB by using this plugin to push performance data, allowing automatic updates of Configuration Item (CI) health states based on live metrics. This ensures an accurate and current state of infrastructure health in ServiceNow.

4. Cloud Resource Optimization: Collect metrics from hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures using Telegraf, streaming directly to ServiceNow. Leverage these metrics for real-time analytics, predictive capacity planning, and resource optimization, enabling proactive management and reduced operational costs.

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