Metricbeat vs Telegraf

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Metricbeat

49
125
+ 1
3
Telegraf

283
320
+ 1
16
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Metricbeat vs Telegraf: What are the differences?

  1. Data Collection: Metricbeat primarily focuses on collecting metrics from various systems and services, while Telegraf is more versatile in that it can collect metrics as well as log data, making it a more comprehensive monitoring tool.

  2. Data Shipper Options: Metricbeat is native to the Elastic Stack, making it a seamless choice for users of this ecosystem, whereas Telegraf offers a wider range of output options, including databases, messaging systems, and cloud services, providing more flexibility in data export.

  3. Plugin Ecosystem: Telegraf has a vast library of plugins for collecting data from different sources, enabling users to quickly set up monitoring for various services, whereas Metricbeat has a more limited set of modules focused on specific metrics collection purposes.

  4. Resource Utilization: Metricbeat is known for its lightweight nature, consuming minimal system resources and having lower network bandwidth usage compared to Telegraf, which can be advantageous in resource-constrained environments.

  5. Configuration and Management: Telegraf offers more advanced configuration options, including the ability to define complex processing pipelines and routing rules, while Metricbeat provides a simpler, more user-friendly configuration setup suitable for beginners or those requiring streamlined monitoring.

  6. Community Support: Both Metricbeat and Telegraf have strong communities, but Telegraf's community-driven development approach and active plugin contributions lead to faster updates and a broader range of features compared to Metricbeat.

In Summary, Metricbeat is ideal for basic metric monitoring within the Elastic Stack, while Telegraf offers a more versatile solution for gathering metrics and log data from a variety of sources.

Advice on Metricbeat and Telegraf
Sunil Chaudhari
Needs advice
on
MetricbeatMetricbeat
and
PrometheusPrometheus

Hi, We have a situation, where we are using Prometheus to get system metrics from PCF (Pivotal Cloud Foundry) platform. We send that as time-series data to Cortex via a Prometheus server and built a dashboard using Grafana. There is another pipeline where we need to read metrics from a Linux server using Metricbeat, CPU, memory, and Disk. That will be sent to Elasticsearch and Grafana will pull and show the data in a dashboard.

Is it OK to use Metricbeat for Linux server or can we use Prometheus?

What is the difference in system metrics sent by Metricbeat and Prometheus node exporters?

Regards, Sunil.

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Replies (2)
Matthew Rothstein
Recommends
on
PrometheusPrometheus

If you're already using Prometheus for your system metrics, then it seems like standing up Elasticsearch just for Linux host monitoring is excessive. The node_exporter is probably sufficient if you'e looking for standard system metrics.

Another thing to consider is that Metricbeat / ELK use a push model for metrics delivery, whereas Prometheus pulls metrics from each node it is monitoring. Depending on how you manage your network security, opting for one solution over two may make things simpler.

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Recommends
on
InstanaInstana

Hi Sunil! Unfortunately, I don´t have much experience with Metricbeat so I can´t advise on the diffs with Prometheus...for Linux server, I encourage you to use Prometheus node exporter and for PCF, I would recommend using the instana tile (https://www.instana.com/supported-technologies/pivotal-cloud-foundry/). Let me know if you have further questions! Regards Jose

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Pros of Metricbeat
Pros of Telegraf
  • 2
    Simple
  • 1
    Easy to setup
  • 5
    One agent can work as multiple exporter with min hndlng
  • 5
    Cohesioned stack for monitoring
  • 2
    Open Source
  • 2
    Metrics
  • 1
    Supports custom plugins in any language
  • 1
    Many hundreds of plugins

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What is Metricbeat?

Collect metrics from your systems and services. From CPU to memory, Redis to NGINX, and much more, It is a lightweight way to send system and service statistics.

What is Telegraf?

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.

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What are some alternatives to Metricbeat and Telegraf?
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.
Filebeat
It helps you keep the simple things simple by offering a lightweight way to forward and centralize logs and files.
collectd
collectd gathers statistics about the system it is running on and stores this information. Those statistics can then be used to find current performance bottlenecks (i.e. performance analysis) and predict future system load (i.e. capacity planning). Or if you just want pretty graphs of your private server and are fed up with some homegrown solution you're at the right place, too.
Fluentd
Fluentd collects events from various data sources and writes them to files, RDBMS, NoSQL, IaaS, SaaS, Hadoop and so on. Fluentd helps you unify your logging infrastructure.
Logstash
Logstash is a tool for managing events and logs. You can use it to collect logs, parse them, and store them for later use (like, for searching). If you store them in Elasticsearch, you can view and analyze them with Kibana.
See all alternatives