HAProxy and Cortex Integration

Input and output integration overview

This plugin gathers and reports statistics from HAProxy, a popular open-source load balancer and proxy server, to help in monitoring and optimizing its performance.

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

HAProxy

The HAProxy plugin for Telegraf enables users to gather statistics directly from a HAProxy server via its stats socket or HTTP statistics page. HAProxy is a widely employed software load balancer and proxy server that provides high availability and performance for TCP and HTTP applications. By integrating with HAProxy, this plugin allows users to monitor and analyze various performance metrics such as active server counts, request rates, response codes, and session statuses in real-time, facilitating better decision-making and proactive management of network resources. Key features include support for both HTTP and socket-based metrics collection, compatibility with basic authentication for secure access, and configurable options for metric field naming, allowing for customization tailored to user preferences.

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

HAProxy

[[inputs.haproxy]]
  ## List of stats endpoints. Metrics can be collected from both http and socket
  ## endpoints. Examples of valid endpoints:
  ##   - http://myhaproxy.com:1936/haproxy?stats
  ##   - https://myhaproxy.com:8000/stats
  ##   - socket:/run/haproxy/admin.sock
  ##   - /run/haproxy/*.sock
  ##   - tcp://127.0.0.1:1936
  ##
  ## Server addresses not starting with 'http://', 'https://', 'tcp://' will be
  ## treated as possible sockets. When specifying local socket, glob patterns are
  ## supported.
  servers = ["http://myhaproxy.com:1936/haproxy?stats"]

  ## By default, some of the fields are renamed from what haproxy calls them.
  ## Setting this option to true results in the plugin keeping the original
  ## field names.
  # keep_field_names = false

  ## Optional TLS Config
  # 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

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

HAProxy

1. Dynamic Load Adjustment: Utilize the HAProxy plugin to monitor traffic patterns in real time, enabling automated adjustments to load balancing algorithms. By continuously gathering metrics on server loads and request rates, system administrators can dynamically allocate resources, ensuring that no single server becomes a bottleneck, thus enhancing overall application performance and availability.

2. Historical Performance Analytics: Integrate this plugin with a time series database to collect HAProxy metrics over time, allowing you to analyze historical performance and traffic trends. This can facilitate predictive analysis and planning for capacity, giving businesses insights into peak traffic times and helping to identify potential future resource needs.

3. Alerting on Anomalies: Implement alerting workflows that trigger when unusual patterns are detected in HAProxy metrics, such as sudden spikes in error rates or drops in request handling capacity. By leveraging this plugin, operations teams can receive timely notifications, allowing for swift intervention and minimizing the impact of potential downtime on end-users.

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.

Feedback

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