2. InfluxDB Data
Collectors
Samantha Wang - Product Manager, InfluxData

3. Connect Learn Build
Hear from and meet developers
from the InfluxDB Community
Be inspired by use cases from
our partners and InfluxDB engineers
Learn best practices that will
help you build great experiences
for your projects

4. InfluxDB provides multiple methods for ingesting data.
Discover the newest options for data collection and
what’s in store for the future of Telegraf.
Samantha Wang
Product Manager, InfluxData
Samantha Wang is currently a Product Manager at
InfluxData, creator of InfluxDB, the leading time series
platform. Samantha is currently responsible for Telegraf,
InfluxData’s open source data collection agent. Previous
to InfluxData, she worked in product and engineering
roles at Gracenote (a Nielsen Company) and Verizon.
Samantha holds a degree in Industrial & Systems
Engineering from the University of Southern California.
InfluxDB Data Collectors

5. Agenda
1. Native Data Collection
2. Client Libraries
3. Telegraf

6. Multiple InfluxDB Ingestion Options
Native Collectors Telegraf Client Libraries
Scrapers Ecosystem InfluxDB API
Interfaces directly with Cloud
data sources (in this case, MQTT
Brokers)
Offers over 300 plugins to collect
data from many data sources
Available for many popular
development languages: Make
API Calls to write data to
InfluxDB Cloud
Scrape Prometheus-formatted
metrics from an HTTP-accessible
endpoint and store them in
InfluxDB.
Configure third-party
technologies to send line
protocol directly to InfluxDB.
Build your own with the
InfluxDB API, which provides a
programmatic interface for
interactions with InfluxDB

7. What is Native Data
Collection?

8. The ability to directly ingest data from
popular data sources without the
need to do any transformation to Line
Protocol or run a Telegraf agent
8
Native Collection

9. 9
MQTT Topic Subscriptions
• Subscribe to topics being published by
their own devices and sent through a
message broker directly to the InfluxDB
Cloud service
• No code or installing any additional
software required

10. MQTT Ingestion: Telegraf vs Native MQTT

11. Simple 3 Step Configuration
Define Parsing Rules
• Configure Rules for
finding timestamps,
measurements, tags, and
field information in the
MQTT messages
Configure Broker
• Broker URL
• Broker TCP/IP Port
Number
• Broker Authentication
Type
• Broker Authentication
Parameters
Configure Topic
• Topic Name
• InfluxDB Bucket

12. What about the Client
Libraries?

13. Client Libraries

14. Improving the user experience
• Release updates to client library last Thursday of the month
• Added an error message if pivot() is not included
• Improved working with timestamps in the pandas dataframe

15. What’s new with Telegraf?

16. T H A N K Y O U
PROJECT NUMBERS

17. 300+ Plugins and Telegraf Capabilities
Recent improvements:
• Apple M1 and RISC-V support
• Precisely schedule collection with `collection_offset`
• Faster line protocol parsing
• Improved MQTT topic and payload parsing
• SNMP plugin can parse MIB files directly
• Test artifacts on pull requests

18. Telegraf Binary growth
+18Mb AWS EC2 Metadata
processor plugin
+10Mb Aliyuncms
input plugin
+8Mb SQL input plugin

19. Telegraf Maintainers
Paweł Żak | @zak-pawel
Software Engineer,
Intel Corporation
Giovanni Luisotto | @Trovalo
DBA & BI Dev,
Quantumdatis
Thomas Casteleyn | @Hipska
Software Engineer,
Super-Visions

20. Telegraf Maintainers
Paweł Żak | @zak-pawel
Software Engineer,
Intel Corporation
Giovanni Luisotto | @Trovalo
DBA & BI Dev,
Quantumdatis
Thomas Casteleyn | @Hipska
Software Engineer,
Super-Visions

21. What’s next for Telegraf?

22. Focus for Telegraf
• Empower users to create a customized Telegraf
• Reducing the Telegraf binary
• Improve the CLI user experience to be logical and consistent
• Align with the future of InfluxDB - logging, tracing, and high
cardinality

23. Telegraf Binary growth
+18Mb AWS EC2 Metadata
processor plugin
+10Mb Aliyuncms
input plugin
+8Mb SQL input plugin

24. Telegraf Custom Builder
make build_tools
./tools/custom_builder/custom_builde
r --config ~/telegraf.conf
Enable users to easily build custom Telegraf agents only with
desired plugins

25. Adds [[secretstores.xyz]] section
to Telegraf config.
Can be managed by JOSE
(Javascript Object Signing and
Encryption) based secret store or
your native OS keyring.
Secret Store in Telegraf
[[secretstores.os]]
## Unique identifier for the secret-store.
## This id can later be used in plugins to
reference the secrets
## in this secret-store via
@{<id>:<secret_key>} (mandatory)
id = "secretstore"
## Keyring of the secrets
## In Windows, keys follow a fixed pattern in
the form `<keyring>:<collection>:<key>`. Please
keep this in mind
## when creating secrets with the Windows
credential tool.
# keyring = "telegraf"
# collection = ""
## Allow dynamic secrets that are updated
during runtime of telegraf
# dynamic = false

26. CLI Rewrite
• Meet developers where they are
• Implement CLI best practices and consistencies
telegraf <subcommand> <options>

27. Continue Releasing Plugins & Features
• OPC-UA events based input plugin
• CSV Serializer
• Azure Monitor Input Plugin
• PostgreSQL Output Plugin
• Plugin state persistence

28. Continue Releasing Plugins & Features
• OPC-UA events based input plugin
• CSV Serializer
• Azure Monitor Input Plugin
• PostgreSQL Output Plugin
• Plugin state persistence

29. Future Breaking
Changes in next
major release
• Plugins and settings
deprecation
• Processors and
Aggregator behavior

30. Changes in release schedule
Current Future
Feature release (2.x) End of every quarter Every month
Maintenance release (2.x.x) Every 3 weeks Only if urgent fixes

31. InfluxData Community Resources
GitHub: https://github.com/influxdata
Slack: http://influxdata.com/slack
Community Forum: https://community.influxdata.com
InfluxDB University: https://university.influxdata.com

32. T H A N K Y O U

33. Additional Resources
Free InfluxDB: OSS or Cloud - influxdata.com/cloud
Forums: community.influxdata.com
Slack: influxcommunity.slack.com
Reddit: r/InfluxData
Influx Community (GH): github.com/InfluxCommunity
Book: awesome.influxdata.com
Docs: docs.influxdata.com
Blogs: influxdata.com/blog
InfluxDB University: influxdata.com/university
How-to guides: docs.influxdata.com/resources/how-to-guides/