setting up telegraf as a linux daemon

Installing telegraf on target server

curl https://dl.influxdata.com/telegraf/releases/telegraf-1.13.3_linux_amd64.tar.gz --output telegraf.tar.gz -k

1. Placing telegraf executable in a specific folder.

tar xf telegraf.tar.gz

After extracting our telegraf.deb, you can move the binary to /usr/local/bin folder and configuration file to /user/local/etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf

Assuming we are in your expand tar directory, /telegraf/usr/bin

sudo cp telegraf /usr/local/bin

Assuming we are in your expand tar directory, /telegraf/etc/telegraf

sudo mkdir /usr/local/etc/telegraf

sudo cp telegraf.conf  /usr/local/etc/telegraf

Next we need to specify what metrics we would like telegraf to send over.   Example below shows the key configuration for DEV environment that we are interested in.

The first is target database and server dns. Here we setup our hostname "urls = "http://WebAppPaymentsInfluxDB.asbbank.co.nz:8086" and database is called "dev_docker_telegraf".

# Configuration for sending metrics to InfluxDB

[[outputs.influxdb]]

  ## The full HTTP or UDP URL for your InfluxDB instance.

  ##

  ## Multiple URLs can be specified for a single cluster, only ONE of the

  ## urls will be written to each interval.

  # urls = ["unix:///var/run/influxdb.sock"]

  # urls = ["udp://127.0.0.1:8089"]

  urls = ["http://WebAppPaymentsInfluxDB.asbbank.co.nz:8086"]

  ## The target database for metrics; will be created as needed.

  ## For UDP url endpoint database needs to be configured on server side.

  database = "dev_docker_telegraf"

Docker metrics is configured by uncommenting the following sections. It should look something below :-

# # Read metrics about docker containers

[[inputs.docker]]

#   ## Docker Endpoint

#   ##   To use TCP, set endpoint = "tcp://[ip]:[port]"

#   ##   To use environment variables (ie, docker-machine), set endpoint = "ENV"

endpoint = "unix:///var/run/docker.sock"

#

#   ## Set to true to collect Swarm metrics(desired_replicas, running_replicas)

gather_services = false

Example of setup for dev environment are shown below :-

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Please make sure you have the configuration updated, saved and place in a specific folder before starting the service.

Running telegraf as an agent

We will setup telegraf to run as an agent. First, we need to create a configuration file call "telegraf.service".

Creating the configuration

Create a file called 'telegraf.service' under '/etc/systemd/system'. It should contain the following :-

[Unit]

Description=telegraf.service

[Service]

ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/telegraf --config /usr/local/etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf

[Install]

WantedBy=multi-user.target:

Running the service

sudo systemctl start telegraf.service

Checking on service  status

sudo systemctl status telegraf.service

Stop the service

This might come in handy if you would like to shutdown a service for testing purposes.

sudo systemctl stop telegraf.service