Webhooks and Cortex Integration

Input and output integration overview

The Webhooks plugin allows Telegraf to receive and process HTTP requests from various external services via webhooks. This plugin enables users to collect real-time metrics and events and integrate them into their monitoring solutions.

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

Webhooks

This Telegraf plugin is designed to act as a webhook listener by starting an HTTP server that registers multiple webhook endpoints. It provides a way to collect events from various services by capturing HTTP requests sent to defined paths. Each service can be configured with its specific authentication details and request handling options. The plugin stands out by allowing integration with any Telegraf output plugin, making it versatile for event-driven architectures. By enabling efficient reception of events, it opens possibilities for real-time monitoring and response systems, essential for modern applications that need instantaneous event handling and processing.

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

Webhooks

[[inputs.webhooks]]
  ## Address and port to host Webhook listener on
  service_address = ":1619"

  ## Maximum duration before timing out read of the request
  # read_timeout = "10s"
  ## Maximum duration before timing out write of the response
  # write_timeout = "10s"

  [inputs.webhooks.filestack]
    path = "/filestack"

    ## HTTP basic auth
    #username = ""
    #password = ""

  [inputs.webhooks.github]
    path = "/github"
    # secret = ""

    ## HTTP basic auth
    #username = ""
    #password = ""

  [inputs.webhooks.mandrill]
    path = "/mandrill"

    ## HTTP basic auth
    #username = ""
    #password = ""

  [inputs.webhooks.rollbar]
    path = "/rollbar"

    ## HTTP basic auth
    #username = ""
    #password = ""

  [inputs.webhooks.papertrail]
    path = "/papertrail"

    ## HTTP basic auth
    #username = ""
    #password = ""

  [inputs.webhooks.particle]
    path = "/particle"

    ## HTTP basic auth
    #username = ""
    #password = ""

  [inputs.webhooks.artifactory]
    path = "/artifactory"

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

Webhooks

1. Real-time Notifications from Github: Integrate the Webhooks Input Plugin with Github to receive real-time notifications for events such as pull requests, commits, and issues. This allows development teams to instantly monitor crucial changes and updates in their repositories, improving collaboration and response times.

2. Automated Alerting with Rollbar: Use this plugin to listen for errors reported from Rollbar, enabling teams to react swiftly to bugs and issues in production. By forwarding these alerts into a centralized monitoring system, teams can prioritize their responses based on severity and prevent escalated downtime.

3. Performance Monitoring from Filestack: Capture events from Filestack to track file uploads, transformations, and errors. This setup helps businesses understand user interactions with file management processes, optimize workflow, and ensure high availability of file services.

4. Centralized Logging with Papertrail: Tie in all logs sent to Papertrail through webhooks, allowing you to consolidate your logging strategy. With real-time log forwarding, teams can analyze trends and anomalies efficiently, ensuring they maintain visibility over critical operations.

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

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.