Ceph and Cortex Integration

Input and output integration overview

The Ceph plugin for Telegraf helps in gathering performance metrics from both MON and OSD nodes in a Ceph storage cluster for effective monitoring and management.

This plugin enables Telegraf to send metrics to Cortex using the Prometheus remote write protocol, allowing seamless ingestion into Cortex’s scalable, multi-tenant time series storage.

Integration details

Ceph

The Ceph Storage Telegraf plugin is designed to collect performance metrics from Monitor (MON) and Object Storage Daemon (OSD) nodes within a Ceph storage cluster. Ceph, a highly scalable storage system, integrates its metrics collection through this plugin, facilitating easy monitoring of its components. With the introduction of this plugin in the 13.x Mimic release, users can effectively gather detailed insights into the performance and health of their Ceph infrastructure. It functions by scanning configured socket directories for specific Ceph service socket files, executing commands via the Ceph administrative interface, and parsing the returned JSON data for metrics. The metrics are organized based on top-level keys, allowing for efficient monitoring and analysis of cluster performance. This plugin provides valuable capabilities for managing and maintaining the performance of a Ceph cluster by allowing administrators to understand system behavior and identify potential issues proactively.

Cortex

With Telegraf’s HTTP output plugin and the prometheusremotewrite data format you can send metrics directly to Cortex, a horizontally scalable, long-term storage backend for Prometheus. Cortex supports multi-tenancy and accepts remote write requests using the Prometheus protobuf format. By using Telegraf as the collection agent and Remote Write as the transport mechanism, organizations can extend observability into sources not natively supported by Prometheus—such as Windows hosts, SNMP-enabled devices, or custom application metrics—while leveraging Cortex’s high-availability and long-retention capabilities.

Configuration

Ceph

[[inputs.ceph]]
  ## This is the recommended interval to poll. Too frequent and you
  ## will lose data points due to timeouts during rebalancing and recovery
  interval = '1m'

  ## All configuration values are optional, defaults are shown below

  ## location of ceph binary
  ceph_binary = "/usr/bin/ceph"

  ## directory in which to look for socket files
  socket_dir = "/var/run/ceph"

  ## prefix of MON and OSD socket files, used to determine socket type
  mon_prefix = "ceph-mon"
  osd_prefix = "ceph-osd"
  mds_prefix = "ceph-mds"
  rgw_prefix = "ceph-client"

  ## suffix used to identify socket files
  socket_suffix = "asok"

  ## Ceph user to authenticate as, ceph will search for the corresponding
  ## keyring e.g. client.admin.keyring in /etc/ceph, or the explicit path
  ## defined in the client section of ceph.conf for example:
  ##
  ##     [client.telegraf]
  ##         keyring = /etc/ceph/client.telegraf.keyring
  ##
  ## Consult the ceph documentation for more detail on keyring generation.
  ceph_user = "client.admin"

  ## Ceph configuration to use to locate the cluster
  ceph_config = "/etc/ceph/ceph.conf"

  ## Whether to gather statistics via the admin socket
  gather_admin_socket_stats = true

  ## Whether to gather statistics via ceph commands, requires ceph_user
  ## and ceph_config to be specified
  gather_cluster_stats = false

Cortex

[[outputs.http]]
  ## Cortex Remote Write endpoint
  url = "http://cortex.example.com/api/v1/push"

  ## Use POST to send data
  method = "POST"

  ## Send metrics using Prometheus remote write format
  data_format = "prometheusremotewrite"

  ## Optional HTTP headers for authentication
  # [outputs.http.headers]
  #   X-Scope-OrgID = "your-tenant-id"
  #   Authorization = "Bearer YOUR_API_TOKEN"

  ## Optional TLS configuration
  # tls_ca = "/path/to/ca.pem"
  # tls_cert = "/path/to/cert.pem"
  # tls_key = "/path/to/key.pem"
  # insecure_skip_verify = false

  ## Request timeout
  timeout = "10s"

Input and output integration examples

Ceph

1. Dynamic Monitoring Dashboard: Utilize the Ceph plugin to create a real-time monitoring dashboard that visually represents the performance metrics of your Ceph cluster. By integrating these metrics into a centralized dashboard, system administrators can gain immediate insights into the health of the storage infrastructure, which aids in quickly identifying and addressing potential issues before they escalate.

2. Automated Alerting System: Implement the Ceph plugin in conjunction with an alerting solution to automatically notify administrators of performance degradation or operational issues within the Ceph cluster. By defining thresholds for key metrics, organizations can ensure prompt response actions, thereby improving overall system reliability and performance.

3. Performance Benchmarking: Use the metrics collected by this plugin to conduct performance benchmarking tests across different configurations or hardware setups of your Ceph storage cluster. This process can assist organizations in identifying optimal configurations that enhance performance and resource utilization, promoting a more efficient storage environment.

4. Capacity Planning and Forecasting: Integrate the metrics gathered from the Ceph storage plugin into broader data analytics and reporting tools to facilitate capacity planning. By analyzing historical metrics, organizations can forecast future utilization trends, enabling informed decisions about scaling storage resources effectively.

Cortex

1. Unified Multi-Tenant Monitoring: Use Telegraf to collect metrics from different teams or environments and push them to Cortex with separate X-Scope-OrgID headers. This enables isolated data ingestion and querying per tenant, ideal for managed services and platform teams.

2. Extending Prometheus Coverage to Edge Devices: Deploy Telegraf on edge or IoT devices to collect system metrics and send them to a centralized Cortex cluster. This approach ensures consistent observability even for environments without local Prometheus scrapers.

3. Global Service Observability with Federated Tenants: Aggregate metrics from global infrastructure by configuring Telegraf agents to push data into regional Cortex clusters, each tagged with tenant identifiers. Cortex handles deduplication and centralized access across regions.

4. Custom App Telemetry Pipeline: Collect app-specific telemetry via Telegraf’s exec or http input plugins and forward it to Cortex. This allows DevOps teams to monitor app-specific KPIs in a scalable, query-efficient format while keeping metrics logically grouped by tenant or service.

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