Telegraf provides an integration to collect metrics from arbitrary HTTP endpoints using the HTTP input plugin. Telegraf collects the metrics, processes them, and sends them to Lightstep Observability using the OpenTelemetry output plugin.

To complete the integration, you will:

  • Configure the Telegraf HTTP input plugin
  • Configure the Telegraf OpenTelemetry output plugin

Configure the Telegraf HTTP input plugin

In the Telegraf configuration file, add configuration for the HTTP input plugin. This input plugin configuration requires setting a target endpoint to fetch the metrics from. Aditional configuration depends on the data_format that you use. You can find complete configuration details in the official HTTP plugin documentation.

This example uses json with the settings needed for that format.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

[[inputs.http]]
  urls = [
    "http://demosvc:8080/heapbasics"
  ]
  timeout = "10s"

  data_format = "json"
  json_name_key = "name"
  json_time_key = "timestamp"
  json_time_format = "unix"

Configure the OpenTelemetry output plugin

To deliver metrics to Lightstep Observability you configure the Telegraf OpenTelmetry output plugin. This plugin sends metrics to Lightstep using gRPC.

This example shows the plugin configured without TLS:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7

[[outputs.opentelemetry]]
  service_address = "ingest.lightstep.com:443"
  insecure_skip_verify = true

  # Additional gRPC request metadata
  [outputs.opentelemetry.headers]
    lightstep-access-token = "$LS_ACCESS_TOKEN"

For more details regarding configuring the OpenTelemetry output plugin see the official Telegraf documentation.

Validate metrics are reporting to Lightstep

You can validate that metrics are reporting to Lightstep on the Metrics details page in Project settings.

  1. In Lightstep, click Project settings > Metric details.

  2. Search for HTTP metric names. Search for metric

  3. If needed, select on the metric to edit the description and how the units are displayed in Lightstep.

View metrics in Lightstep

After you have Lightstep ingesting metrics from the HTTP endpoint, you can use the Lightstep Terraform Provider to create a dashboard for the metrics.

Additional resources