NATS and Cortex Integration
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Table of Contents
Powerful Performance, Limitless Scale
Collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-velocity data. Any data is more valuable when you think of it as time series data. with InfluxDB, the #1 time series platform built to scale with Telegraf.
See Ways to Get Started
Input and output integration overview
The NATS Consumer Input Plugin enables real-time data consumption from NATS messaging subjects, integrating seamlessly into the Telegraf data pipeline for monitoring and metrics gathering.
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
NATS
The NATS Consumer Plugin allows Telegraf to read metrics from specified NATS subjects and create metrics based on supported input data formats. Utilizing a Queue Group allows multiple instances of Telegraf to read from a NATS cluster in parallel, enhancing throughput and reliability. This plugin also supports various authentication methods, including username/password, NATS credentials files, and nkey seed files, ensuring secure communication with the NATS servers. It is particularly useful in environments where data persistence and message reliability are critical, thanks to features such as JetStream that facilitate the consumption of historical messages. Additionally, the ability to configure various operational parameters makes this plugin suitable for high-throughput scenarios while maintaining performance integrity.
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
NATS
[[inputs.nats_consumer]]
## urls of NATS servers
servers = ["nats://localhost:4222"]
## subject(s) to consume
## If you use jetstream you need to set the subjects
## in jetstream_subjects
subjects = ["telegraf"]
## jetstream subjects
## jetstream is a streaming technology inside of nats.
## With jetstream the nats-server persists messages and
## a consumer can consume historical messages. This is
## useful when telegraf needs to restart it don't miss a
## message. You need to configure the nats-server.
## https://docs.nats.io/nats-concepts/jetstream.
jetstream_subjects = ["js_telegraf"]
## name a queue group
queue_group = "telegraf_consumers"
## Optional authentication with username and password credentials
# username = ""
# password = ""
## Optional authentication with NATS credentials file (NATS 2.0)
# credentials = "/etc/telegraf/nats.creds"
## Optional authentication with nkey seed file (NATS 2.0)
# nkey_seed = "/etc/telegraf/seed.txt"
## Use Transport Layer Security
# secure = 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
## Sets the limits for pending msgs and bytes for each subscription
## These shouldn't need to be adjusted except in very high throughput scenarios
# pending_message_limit = 65536
# pending_bytes_limit = 67108864
## Max undelivered messages
## This plugin uses tracking metrics, which ensure messages are read to
## outputs before acknowledging them to the original broker to ensure data
## is not lost. This option sets the maximum messages to read from the
## broker that have not been written by an output.
##
## This value needs to be picked with awareness of the agent's
## metric_batch_size value as well. Setting max undelivered messages too high
## can result in a constant stream of data batches to the output. While
## setting it too low may never flush the broker's messages.
# max_undelivered_messages = 1000
## Data format to consume.
## Each data format has its own unique set of configuration options, read
## more about them here:
## https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/blob/master/docs/DATA_FORMATS_INPUT.md
data_format = "influx"
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
NATS
-
Real-Time Analytics Dashboard: Utilize the NATS plugin to gather metrics from various NATS subjects in real time and feed them into a centralized analytics dashboard. This setup allows for immediate visibility into live application performance, enabling teams to react swiftly to operational issues or performance degradation.
-
Distributed System Monitoring: Deploy multiple instances of Telegraf configured with the NATS plugin across a distributed architecture. This approach allows teams to aggregate metrics from various microservices efficiently, providing a holistic view of system health and performance while ensuring no messages are dropped during transmission.
-
Historical Message Recovery: Leverage the capabilities of NATS JetStream along with this plugin to recover and process historical messages after Telegraf has been restarted. This feature is particularly beneficial for applications that require high reliability, ensuring that no critical metrics are lost even in case of service disruptions.
-
Dynamic Load Balancing: Implement a dynamic load balancing scenario where Telegraf instances consume messages from a NATS cluster based on load. Adjust the queue group settings to control the number of active consumers, allowing for better resource utilization and performance scaling as demand fluctuations occur.
Cortex
-
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. -
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.
-
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.
-
Custom App Telemetry Pipeline: Collect app-specific telemetry via Telegraf’s
exec
orhttp
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
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.
Powerful Performance, Limitless Scale
Collect, organize, and act on massive volumes of high-velocity data. Any data is more valuable when you think of it as time series data. with InfluxDB, the #1 time series platform built to scale with Telegraf.
See Ways to Get Started
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