Supervisor and Cortex Integration

Input and output integration overview

This plugin gathers information about processes running under Supervisor using the XML-RPC API.

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

Supervisor

The Supervisor plugin for Telegraf is designed to collect metrics about processes managed by the Supervisor process control system using its XML-RPC API. The plugin is able to track various metrics, including process states and uptime, and provides options for configuring which metrics to collect through include or exclude lists. This integration is particularly useful for monitoring applications running under Supervisor, providing insights into their operational status and performance metrics. A minimum tested Supervisor version is 3.3.2, and it is recommended to secure the HTTP server with basic authentication for better security.

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

Supervisor

[[inputs.supervisor]]
  ## Url of supervisor's XML-RPC endpoint if basic auth enabled in supervisor http server,
  ## than you have to add credentials to url (ex. http://login:pass@localhost:9001/RPC2)
  # url="http://localhost:9001/RPC2"
  ## With settings below you can manage gathering additional information about processes
  ## If both of them empty, then all additional information will be collected.
  ## Currently supported supported additional metrics are: pid, rc
  # metrics_include = []
  # metrics_exclude = ["pid", "rc"]

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

Supervisor

1. Centralized Monitoring Dashboard: Implement this plugin to feed Supervisor metrics directly into a centralized monitoring dashboard, allowing teams to visualize the health and performance of their applications in real-time. This integration enables quick identification of issues, helps track service performance over time, and aids in capacity planning based on observed trends.

2. Alerting for Process Failures: Utilize the metrics gathered by the Supervisor plugin to create an alerting mechanism that notifies engineers when critical processes go down or enter a fatal state. By setting thresholds in your monitoring system, teams can respond proactively to potential problems, minimizing downtime and ensuring system reliability.

3. Historical Analysis of Process States: Store the metrics collected over time to analyze process state changes and patterns. By examining historical data, teams can identify recurring issues, track the impact of deployment changes, and optimize resource allocation based on process trends, leading to improved overall system performance.

4. Integration with Incident Management Systems: Configure the Supervisor plugin to automatically send alerts to incident management systems like PagerDuty or OpsGenie when a process reaches a critical state. This integration streamlines the incident response process, ensuring that the right team members are notified promptly and can take action without delay.

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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