You can use open source Telegraf that runs on a vCenter Server VM, an EC2 AWS instance, or an Azure VM to send metrics to VMware Aria Operations using a helper script or by providing specific configurations required on the end point to post metrics to cloud proxy. The helper script adds necessary configurations in the Telegraf configuration that is directly identified by VMware Aria Operations.

You can monitor application services and operating systems that are supported by VMware Aria Operations and you can also monitor unsupported application services. For a list of supported application services, see Supported Application Services.

Open source Telegraf is supported on Linux and Windows platforms.

Notice: VMware supports only the installation of open source Telegraf because there is a configuration required to point it to the VMware Aria Operations cloud proxy. After the initial configuration is complete, and we have made sure that the metrics are received consistently for a couple of end points, and there are no common patterns of failures observed on VMware Aria Operations, no further support is offered from VMware. Any other queries on the agent has to go through the Telegraf open source community. Issues related to Telegraf can be raised through: https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/issues.

Points to Note

As you can monitor both supported and unsupported application services using open source Telegraf, keep in mind the following points.

  • There are no alerts generated for non-supported application services.
  • You cannot add metrics for supported application services.
  • Application service objects that are not supported are named as follows: <application service name_Generic>
  • Metrics for unsupported application services are displayed without proper categorization and appears as is from Telegraf.
  • Metrics for unsupported application services are not localized and are provided only in English.
  • If there are multiple instances of unsupported application services, to distinguish between them in the user interface, add the tag 'identifier' and provide a unique tag value in the telegraf.conf file. Example, [inputs.mongodb.tags] identifier="1".
  • If multiple instances of the same supported application service is monitored by open source Telegraf, in the user interface, the display name is the same for all instances of the application service. To differentiate between the instances of the same application service, edit the display name from the user interface and provide a specific name.
  • Inactivated application services with a managed agent are displayed as activated in the Manage Telegraf Agents page. Uninstall managed agents before you use open source Telegraf.
  • Telegraf version 1.19.0 is not supported when you use open source Telegraf.