Telegraf provides an integration for monitoring network endpoints using the Net Response plugin. Telegraf generates metrics based on the response it receives from sending a message to the endpoint. It converts the result to a metric that it then sends to Lightstep Observability using the OpenTelemetry output plugin.

To complete the integration, you will:

  • Configure Telegraf to ingest endpoint status metrics using the Net Response plugin
  • Configure the OpenTelemetry output plugin

Configure the Telegraf Net Response plugin

In the Telegraf configuration file, add configuration for the address and network protocol. Other options vary, depending upon whether you use UDP or TCP. You can find complete details on the plugin’s features and configuration in the official Net Response plugin documentation.

This example configuration below uses UDP, which provides the send and response feature.

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[[inputs.net_response]]
  protocol = "udp"
  address = "demosvc:9876"
  send = "yolo"
  expect = "up"
  timeout = "2s"

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:

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[[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 Net Response metric names. Search for metric

    See the Net Response input plugin documentation for a complete list of emitted metrics.

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

View metrics in Lightstep

Once you have Lightstep ingesting metrics from the Net Response, you can use the Lightstep Terraform Provider to create a dashboard for the metrics.

Additional resources