Webhooks and Thanos 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 sends metrics from Telegraf to Thanos using the Prometheus remote write protocol over HTTP, allowing efficient and scalable ingestion into Thanos Receive components.

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.

Thanos

Telegraf’s HTTP plugin can send metrics directly to Thanos via its Remote Write-compatible Receive component. By setting the data format to prometheusremotewrite, Telegraf can serialize metrics into the same protobuf-based format used by native Prometheus clients. This setup enables high-throughput, low-latency metric ingestion into Thanos, facilitating centralized observability at scale. It is particularly useful in hybrid environments where Telegraf is collecting metrics from systems outside Prometheus’ native reach, such as SNMP devices, Windows hosts, or custom apps, and streams them directly to Thanos for long-term storage and global querying.

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"

Thanos

[[outputs.http]]
  ## Thanos Receive endpoint for remote write
  url = "http://thanos-receive.example.com/api/v1/receive"

  ## HTTP method
  method = "POST"

  ## Data format set to Prometheus remote write
  data_format = "prometheusremotewrite"

  ## Optional headers (authorization, etc.)
  # [outputs.http.headers]
  #   Authorization = "Bearer YOUR_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.

Thanos

1. Agentless Cloud Monitoring: Deploy Telegraf agents across cloud VMs to collect system and application metrics, then stream them directly into Thanos using Remote Write. This provides centralized observability without requiring Prometheus nodes at each location.

2. Scalable Windows Host Monitoring: Use Telegraf on Windows machines to collect OS-level metrics and send them via Remote Write to Thanos Receive. This enables observability across heterogeneous environments with native Prometheus support only on Linux.

3. Cross-Region Metrics Federation: Telegraf agents in multiple geographic regions can push data to region-local Thanos Receivers using this plugin. From there, Thanos can deduplicate and query metrics globally, reducing latency and network egress costs.

4. Integrating Third-Party Data into Thanos: Collect metrics from custom telemetry sources such as REST APIs or proprietary logs using Telegraf inputs and forward them to Thanos via Remote Write. This brings non-native data into a Prometheus-compatible, long-term analytics pipeline.

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.