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System Design Masterclass · Observability Monitoring
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You need to collect metrics from your application servers, your PostgreSQL databases, your caches, your Kafka clusters, your Docker containers, your AWS CloudWatch, and your custom application endpoints. Each has a different protocol, a different data format, and a different collection method.
Telegraf is a single Go binary with 300+ input plugins that knows how to collect metrics from virtually every system you'd find in a modern infrastructure. Install one agent, configure which plugins to enable, and it handles the rest, pulling metrics from all your systems and pushing them to your metrics backend.
Built by InfluxData (the company behind InfluxDB), Telegraf was designed as the universal metrics collection agent. While it works natively with InfluxDB, it also outputs to Prometheus, Datadog, Elasticsearch, , and dozens of other backends, making it useful regardless of your monitoring stack.
Telegraf has four plugin types:
| Plugin Type | Purpose | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Input | Collect metrics from sources | cpu, mem, disk, postgresql, redis, kafka, , cloudwatch, prometheus |
| Processor | Transform metrics in-flight | rename, converter, regex, topk |
| Aggregator | Compute aggregates over time | basicstats (min/max/mean), histogram |
| Output | Send metrics to backends | influxdb, prometheus_client, datadog, , kafka |
A typical Telegraf configuration collects system metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network), database metrics (connection count, query time, lag), and application metrics (custom StatsD or Prometheus endpoints), all from one agent with one config file.
Resource footprint: Telegraf is a single Go binary using ~50-100MB of memory. It's lighter than Java-based agents but heavier than Fluent Bit or the Node Exporter. For most deployments, the resource overhead is negligible.