Amazon ECS and PostgreSQL Integration

Input and output integration overview

The Amazon ECS Input Plugin enables Telegraf to gather metrics from AWS ECS containers, providing detailed insights into container performance and resource usage.

The Telegraf PostgreSQL plugin allows you to efficiently write metrics to a PostgreSQL database while automatically managing the database schema.

Integration details

Amazon ECS

The Amazon ECS plugin for Telegraf is designed to collect metrics from ECS (Elastic Container Service) tasks running on AWS Fargate or EC2 instances. By utilizing the ECS metadata and stats API endpoints (v2 and v3), it fetches real-time information about container performance and health within a task. This plugin operates within the same task as the inspected workload, ensuring seamless access to metadata and statistics. Notably, it incorporates ECS-specific features that distinguish it from the Docker input plugin, such as handling unique ECS metadata formats and statistics. Users can include or exclude specific containers and adjust which container states to monitor, along with defining tag options for ECS labels. This flexibility allows for a tailored monitoring experience that aligns with the specific needs of an ECS environment, thereby enhancing observability and control over containerized applications.

PostgreSQL

The PostgreSQL plugin enables users to write metrics to a PostgreSQL database or a compatible database, providing robust support for schema management by automatically updating missing columns. The plugin is designed to facilitate integration with monitoring solutions, allowing users to efficiently store and manage time series data. It offers configurable options for connection settings, concurrency, and error handling, and supports advanced features such as JSONB storage for tags and fields, foreign key tagging, templated schema modifications, and support for unsigned integer data types through the pguint extension.

Configuration

Amazon ECS

[[inputs.ecs]]
  # endpoint_url = ""
  # container_name_include = []
  # container_name_exclude = []
  # container_status_include = []
  # container_status_exclude = []
  ecs_label_include = [ "com.amazonaws.ecs.*" ]
  ecs_label_exclude = []
  # timeout = "5s"

[[inputs.ecs]]
  endpoint_url = "http://169.254.170.2"
  # container_name_include = []
  # container_name_exclude = []
  # container_status_include = []
  # container_status_exclude = []
  ecs_label_include = [ "com.amazonaws.ecs.*" ]
  ecs_label_exclude = []
  # timeout = "5s"

PostgreSQL

# Publishes metrics to a postgresql database
[[outputs.postgresql]]
  ## Specify connection address via the standard libpq connection string:
  ##   host=... user=... password=... sslmode=... dbname=...
  ## Or a URL:
  ##   postgres://[user[:password]]@localhost[/dbname]?sslmode=[disable|verify-ca|verify-full]
  ## See https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/libpq-connect.html#LIBPQ-CONNSTRING
  ##
  ## All connection parameters are optional. Environment vars are also supported.
  ## e.g. PGPASSWORD, PGHOST, PGUSER, PGDATABASE
  ## All supported vars can be found here:
  ##  https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/libpq-envars.html
  ##
  ## Non-standard parameters:
  ##   pool_max_conns (default: 1) - Maximum size of connection pool for parallel (per-batch per-table) inserts.
  ##   pool_min_conns (default: 0) - Minimum size of connection pool.
  ##   pool_max_conn_lifetime (default: 0s) - Maximum age of a connection before closing.
  ##   pool_max_conn_idle_time (default: 0s) - Maximum idle time of a connection before closing.
  ##   pool_health_check_period (default: 0s) - Duration between health checks on idle connections.
  # connection = ""

  ## Postgres schema to use.
  # schema = "public"

  ## Store tags as foreign keys in the metrics table. Default is false.
  # tags_as_foreign_keys = false

  ## Suffix to append to table name (measurement name) for the foreign tag table.
  # tag_table_suffix = "_tag"

  ## Deny inserting metrics if the foreign tag can't be inserted.
  # foreign_tag_constraint = false

  ## Store all tags as a JSONB object in a single 'tags' column.
  # tags_as_jsonb = false

  ## Store all fields as a JSONB object in a single 'fields' column.
  # fields_as_jsonb = false

  ## Name of the timestamp column
  ## NOTE: Some tools (e.g. Grafana) require the default name so be careful!
  # timestamp_column_name = "time"

  ## Type of the timestamp column
  ## Currently, "timestamp without time zone" and "timestamp with time zone"
  ## are supported
  # timestamp_column_type = "timestamp without time zone"

  ## Templated statements to execute when creating a new table.
  # create_templates = [
  #   '''CREATE TABLE {{ .table }} ({{ .columns }})''',
  # ]

  ## Templated statements to execute when adding columns to a table.
  ## Set to an empty list to disable. Points containing tags for which there is no column will be skipped. Points
  ## containing fields for which there is no column will have the field omitted.
  # add_column_templates = [
  #   '''ALTER TABLE {{ .table }} ADD COLUMN IF NOT EXISTS {{ .columns|join ", ADD COLUMN IF NOT EXISTS " }}''',
  # ]

  ## Templated statements to execute when creating a new tag table.
  # tag_table_create_templates = [
  #   '''CREATE TABLE {{ .table }} ({{ .columns }}, PRIMARY KEY (tag_id))''',
  # ]

  ## Templated statements to execute when adding columns to a tag table.
  ## Set to an empty list to disable. Points containing tags for which there is no column will be skipped.
  # tag_table_add_column_templates = [
  #   '''ALTER TABLE {{ .table }} ADD COLUMN IF NOT EXISTS {{ .columns|join ", ADD COLUMN IF NOT EXISTS " }}''',
  # ]

  ## The postgres data type to use for storing unsigned 64-bit integer values (Postgres does not have a native
  ## unsigned 64-bit integer type).
  ## The value can be one of:
  ##   numeric - Uses the PostgreSQL "numeric" data type.
  ##   uint8 - Requires pguint extension (https://github.com/petere/pguint)
  # uint64_type = "numeric"

  ## When using pool_max_conns>1, and a temporary error occurs, the query is retried with an incremental backoff. This
  ## controls the maximum backoff duration.
  # retry_max_backoff = "15s"

  ## Approximate number of tag IDs to store in in-memory cache (when using tags_as_foreign_keys).
  ## This is an optimization to skip inserting known tag IDs.
  ## Each entry consumes approximately 34 bytes of memory.
  # tag_cache_size = 100000

  ## Enable & set the log level for the Postgres driver.
  # log_level = "warn" # trace, debug, info, warn, error, none

Input and output integration examples

Amazon ECS

1. Dynamic Container Monitoring: Use the Amazon ECS plugin to monitor container health dynamically within an autoscaling ECS architecture. As new containers spin up or down, the plugin will automatically adjust the metrics it collects, ensuring that each container’s performance data is captured efficiently without manual configuration.

2. Custom Resource Allocation Alerts: Implement the ECS plugin to establish thresholds for resource usage per container. By integrating with notification systems, teams can receive alerts when a container’s CPU or memory usage exceeds predefined limits, enabling proactive resource management and maintaining application performance.

3. Cost-Optimization Dashboard: Leverage the metrics gathered from the ECS plugin to create a dashboard that visualizes resource usage and costs associated with each container. This insight allows organizations to identify underutilized resources, optimizing costs associated with their container infrastructure, thus driving financial efficiency in cloud operations.

4. Advanced Container Security Monitoring: Utilize this plugin in conjunction with security tools to monitor ECS container metrics for anomalies. By continuously analyzing usage patterns, any sudden spikes or irregular behaviors can be detected, prompting automated security responses and maintaining system integrity.

PostgreSQL

1. Real-Time Analytics with Complex Queries: Leverage the PostgreSQL plugin to store metrics from various sources in a PostgreSQL database, enabling real-time analytics using complex queries. This setup can help data scientists and analysts uncover patterns and trends, as they manipulate relational data across multiple tables while utilizing PostgreSQL’s robust query optimization features. Specifically, users can create sophisticated reports with JOIN operations across different metric tables, revealing insights that would typically remain hidden in embedded systems.

2. Integrating with TimescaleDB for Time-Series Data: Utilize the PostgreSQL plugin within a TimescaleDB instance to efficiently handle and analyze time-series data. By implementing hypertables, users can achieve greater performance and partitioning of topics over the time dimension. This integration allows users to run analytical queries over large amounts of time-series data while retaining the full power of PostgreSQL’s SQL queries, ensuring reliability and efficiency in metrics analysis.

3. Data Versioning and Historical Analysis: Implement a strategy using the PostgreSQL plugin to maintain different versions of metrics over time. Users can set up an immutable data table structure where older versions of tables are retained, enabling easy historical analysis. This approach not only provides insights into data evolution but also aids compliance with data retention policies, ensuring that the historical integrity of the datasets remains intact.

4. Dynamic Schema Management for Evolving Metrics: Use the plugin’s templating capabilities to create a dynamically changing schema that responds to metric variations. This use case allows organizations to adapt their data structure as metrics evolve, adding necessary fields and ensuring adherence to data integrity policies. By leveraging templated SQL commands, users can extend their database without manual intervention, facilitating agile data management practices.

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