Graphite vs Telegraf

Overview

Graphite

Stacks383

Followers419

Votes42

GitHub Stars6.0K

Forks1.3K

Telegraf

Stacks289

Followers321

Votes16

GitHub Stars16.4K

Forks5.7K

Graphite vs Telegraf: What are the differences?

Graphite is a scalable and flexible tool for storing, retrieving, and visualizing time-series data, while Telegraf is a data collection agent that gathers metrics from various sources and sends them to different storage backends. Let's explore the key differences between Graphite and Telegraf:

Functionality and Use Case: Graphite is primarily designed as a time-series database and visualization tool. It excels at storing and graphing time-series data, making it suitable for monitoring and analyzing metrics over time. On the other hand, Telegraf is a data collection agent that focuses on gathering metrics from various sources, such as system resources, services, and applications. It is often used as part of a larger monitoring stack to collect and aggregate data before sending it to storage backends like Graphite.
Data Collection and Aggregation: Graphite relies on external agents or applications to send data to it, and it is primarily responsible for storing and displaying the received metrics. In contrast, Telegraf is specifically designed for data collection and aggregation. It comes with a wide range of input plugins that can collect metrics from various sources, process the data, and then send it to multiple output plugins, including Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, and more.
Plugin Ecosystem: Telegraf has a rich ecosystem of plugins, which makes it highly versatile and adaptable to different monitoring environments. It supports a wide range of input and output plugins, allowing users to collect metrics from diverse sources and send them to various storage systems or visualization tools. Graphite, while it can receive data from external sources, does not offer the same level of extensibility and plugin support as Telegraf.
Data Storage and Querying: Graphite uses the Whisper database for data storage, which is optimized for time-series data. It provides efficient data retention policies and allows users to query data using a simple, flexible query language. Telegraf, being a data collection agent, does not handle data storage itself but can send metrics to storage systems like Graphite, InfluxDB, or Prometheus, which have their own querying languages and data storage mechanisms.
Deployment Complexity: Graphite is a standalone tool that requires separate installation and setup. While it offers scalability and performance optimizations, its deployment may involve more configuration and management effort. Telegraf, on the other hand, is relatively easy to deploy and manage due to its lightweight nature and plugin-based architecture.

In summary, Graphite is a time-series database and visualization tool, while Telegraf is a data collection agent designed to gather metrics from various sources and send them to different storage backends.

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Advice on Graphite, Telegraf

Susmita

Senior SRE at African Bank

Jul 28, 2020

Needs adviceon

Grafana

Looking for a tool which can be used for mainly dashboard purposes, but here are the main requirements:

Must be able to get custom data from AS400,
Able to display automation test results,
System monitoring / Nginx API,
Able to get data from 3rd parties DB.

Grafana is almost solving all the problems, except AS400 and no database to get automation test results.

869k views869k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Graphite	Telegraf
Graphite does two things: 1) Store numeric time-series data and 2) Render graphs of this data on demand	It is an agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics. Design goals are to have a minimal memory footprint with a plugin system so that developers in the community can easily add support for collecting metrics.
carbon - a Twisted daemon that listens for time-series data;whisper - a simple database library for storing time-series data (similar in design to RRD);graphite webapp - A Django webapp that renders graphs on-demand using Cairo	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 6.0K	GitHub Stars 16.4K
GitHub Forks 1.3K	GitHub Forks 5.7K
Stacks 383	Stacks 289
Followers 419	Followers 321
Votes 42	Votes 16
Pros & Cons
Pros 16 Render any graph 9 Great functions to apply on timeseries 8 Well supported integrations 6 Includes event tracking 3 Rolling aggregation makes storage managable	Pros 5 Cohesioned stack for monitoring 5 One agent can work as multiple exporter with min hndlng 2 Open Source 2 Metrics 1 Many hundreds of plugins
Integrations
Sensu Nagios Logstash Windows Server Netdata Riemann Diamond collectd Ganglia	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Graphite, Telegraf?

Grafana

Grafana is a general purpose dashboard and graph composer. It's focused on providing rich ways to visualize time series metrics, mainly though graphs but supports other ways to visualize data through a pluggable panel architecture. It currently has rich support for for Graphite, InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. But supports other data sources via plugins.

Kibana

Kibana is an open source (Apache Licensed), browser based analytics and search dashboard for Elasticsearch. Kibana is a snap to setup and start using. Kibana strives to be easy to get started with, while also being flexible and powerful, just like Elasticsearch.

Prometheus

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring system. It collects metrics from configured targets at given intervals, evaluates rule expressions, displays the results, and can trigger alerts if some condition is observed to be true.

Nagios

Nagios is a host/service/network monitoring program written in C and released under the GNU General Public License.

Netdata

Netdata collects metrics per second & presents them in low-latency dashboards. It's designed to run on all of your physical & virtual servers, cloud deployments, Kubernetes clusters & edge/IoT devices, to monitor systems, containers & apps

Zabbix

Zabbix is a mature and effortless enterprise-class open source monitoring solution for network monitoring and application monitoring of millions of metrics.

Sensu

Sensu is the future-proof solution for multi-cloud monitoring at scale. The Sensu monitoring event pipeline empowers businesses to automate their monitoring workflows and gain deep visibility into their multi-cloud environments.

Lumigo

Lumigo is an observability platform built for developers, unifying distributed tracing with payload data, log management, and real-time metrics to help you deeply understand and troubleshoot your systems.

StatsD

It is a network daemon that runs on the Node.js platform and listens for statistics, like counters and timers, sent over UDP or TCP and sends aggregates to one or more pluggable backend services (e.g., Graphite).

Jaeger

Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing System

Related Comparisons

Functionality and Use Case: Graphite is primarily designed as a time-series database and visualization tool. It excels at storing and graphing time-series data, making it suitable for monitoring and analyzing metrics over time. On the other hand, Telegraf is a data collection agent that focuses on gathering metrics from various sources, such as system resources, services, and applications. It is often used as part of a larger monitoring stack to collect and aggregate data before sending it to storage backends like Graphite.
Data Collection and Aggregation: Graphite relies on external agents or applications to send data to it, and it is primarily responsible for storing and displaying the received metrics. In contrast, Telegraf is specifically designed for data collection and aggregation. It comes with a wide range of input plugins that can collect metrics from various sources, process the data, and then send it to multiple output plugins, including Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, and more.
Plugin Ecosystem: Telegraf has a rich ecosystem of plugins, which makes it highly versatile and adaptable to different monitoring environments. It supports a wide range of input and output plugins, allowing users to collect metrics from diverse sources and send them to various storage systems or visualization tools. Graphite, while it can receive data from external sources, does not offer the same level of extensibility and plugin support as Telegraf.
Data Storage and Querying: Graphite uses the Whisper database for data storage, which is optimized for time-series data. It provides efficient data retention policies and allows users to query data using a simple, flexible query language. Telegraf, being a data collection agent, does not handle data storage itself but can send metrics to storage systems like Graphite, InfluxDB, or Prometheus, which have their own querying languages and data storage mechanisms.
Deployment Complexity: Graphite is a standalone tool that requires separate installation and setup. While it offers scalability and performance optimizations, its deployment may involve more configuration and management effort. Telegraf, on the other hand, is relatively easy to deploy and manage due to its lightweight nature and plugin-based architecture.

Graphite vs Telegraf