System Metrics

Ship your System Metrics to your Logit.io stack

The following integration guide will show you how to ship your system metrics to Logit.io using Telegraf and then view them in Grafana.

Metrics

Configure Telegraf to ship your system metrics to Logit.io.

Install Integration

Please click on the Install Integration button to configure your stack for this source.

Install Telegraf

This integration allows you to configure a Telegraf agent to send your metrics, in multiple formats, to Logit.io.

Choose the installation method for your operating system:

When you paste the command below into Powershell it will download the Telegraf zip file. Once that is complete, press Enter again and the zip file will be extracted into C:\Program Files\InfluxData\telegraf\telegraf-1.31.2.

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/telegraf/releases/telegraf-1.31.2_windows_amd64.zip -UseBasicParsing -OutFile telegraf-1.31.2_windows_amd64.zip 
Expand-Archive .\telegraf-1.31.2_windows_amd64.zip -DestinationPath 'C:\Program Files\InfluxData\telegraf'

Configure the plugin

The default telegraf.conf configuration file is thousands of lines long so, for simplicity, we will create a new configuration file for this guide. Create a new text file and copy the configuration details below into it and save it as telegraf-demo.conf in the directory where Telegraf has been installed.

The configuration below will scrape a selection of system metrics from the machine you have installed Telegraf on and these will be sent to your Logit.io stack. Metrics include CPU, memory and disk usage and system metrics such as system load and uptime.

We are going to use the win_perf_counters input plugin to scrape the CPU usage metric from your Windows host.

# Input plugin to report Windows services info.
# This plugin ONLY supports Windows
[[inputs.win_services]]
  ## Names of the services to monitor. Leave empty to monitor all the available services on the host. Globs accepted. Case sensitive.
  service_names = [
    "LanmanServer",
    "TermService",
    "Win*",
  ]
  excluded_service_names = ['WinRM'] # optional, list of service names to exclude
 
###############################################################################
# Windows Performance Counters plugin.
# These are the recommended method of monitoring system metrics on windows,
# as the regular system plugins (inputs.cpu, inputs.mem, etc.) rely on WMI,
# which utilize more system resources.
#
# See more configuration examples at:
#   https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/tree/master/plugins/inputs/win_perf_counters
[[inputs.win_perf_counters]]
  [[inputs.win_perf_counters.object]]
    # Processor usage, alternative to native, reports on a per core.
    ObjectName = "Processor"
    Instances = ["*"]
    Counters = [
      "% Idle Time",
      "% Interrupt Time",
      "% Privileged Time",
      "% User Time",
      "% Processor Time",
    ]
    Measurement = "win_cpu"
    # Set to true to include _Total instance when querying for all (*).
    #IncludeTotal=false
  [[inputs.win_perf_counters.object]]
    # Disk times and queues
    ObjectName = "LogicalDisk"
    Instances = ["*"]
    Counters = [
      "% Idle Time",
      "% Disk Time","% Disk Read Time",
      "% Disk Write Time",
      "% User Time",
      "Current Disk Queue Length",
    ]
    Measurement = "win_disk"
    # Set to true to include _Total instance when querying for all (*).
    #IncludeTotal=false
  [[inputs.win_perf_counters.object]]
    ObjectName = "System"
    Counters = [
      "Context Switches/sec",
      "System Calls/sec",
    ]
    Instances = ["------"]
    Measurement = "win_system"
    # Set to true to include _Total instance when querying for all (*).
    #IncludeTotal=false
  [[inputs.win_perf_counters.object]]
    # Example query where the Instance portion must be removed to get data back,
    # such as from the Memory object.
    ObjectName = "Memory"
    Counters = [
      "Available Bytes",
      "Cache Faults/sec",
      "Demand Zero Faults/sec",
      "Page Faults/sec",
      "Pages/sec",
      "Transition Faults/sec",
      "Pool Nonpaged Bytes",
      "Pool Paged Bytes",
    ]
    # Use 6 x - to remove the Instance bit from the query.
    Instances = ["------"]
    Measurement = "win_mem"
    # Set to true to include _Total instance when querying for all (*).
    #IncludeTotal=false
 
  [[inputs.win_perf_counters.object]]
    # Example query where the Instance portion must be removed to get data back,
    # such as from the Paging File object.
    ObjectName = "Paging File"
    Counters = [
      "% Usage",
    ]
    Instances = ["_Total"]
    Measurement = "win_swap"
 
    [[outputs.http]]
    url = "https://@metricsUsername:@metricsPassword@@metrics_id-vm.logit.io:@vmAgentPort/api/v1/write"
    data_format = "prometheusremotewrite"
 
    [outputs.http.headers]
      Content-Type = "application/x-protobuf"
      Content-Encoding = "snappy"

Start Telegraf

From the location where Telegraf was installed (C:\Program Files\InfluxData\telegraf\telegraf-1.31.2) run the program providing the chosen configuration file as a parameter:

.\telegraf.exe --config telegraf-demo.conf

Once Telegraf is running you should see output similar to the following, which confirms the inputs, output and basic configuration the application has been started with: Powershell Telegraf information

Launch Metrics to View Data

Click the 'Launch Metrics' button below to open the infrastructure metrics visualizer.

Launch Metrics

Now, as a simple demonstration we will use Grafana to view some metrics data that is being sent to your Logit.io stack.

Once Grafana has been opened, click on the Explore option in the left-hand menu: Grafana Explore

Under the Metric header you will see 'Select metric'. Open the drop-down menu and scroll to and select 'win_mem_Available_Bytes':

Grafana Select Metric

Click on the blue Run query button near the top-right of the screen:

Grafana Run Query

You will now see the metric data displayed and if you click on the blue Run query button this will be updated. You can set this to automatically update by clicking on the arrow on the blue button and chosing the interval at which you want the data to be updated.

When you want to stop Telegraf sending metric data press Ctrl + C in the terminal app / Powershell.

If you need any further assistance with shipping your metric data to Logit.io we're here to help you get started. Feel free to get in contact with our support team by sending us a message via live chat & we'll be happy to assist.

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