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Survey of available time series monitoring solutions
Vault and Consul use the go-metrics library to export telemetry. Currently they support the following options:
- Circonus
- DataDog's DogStatsd
- Statsite
- Statsd
Note that DataDog's agent and Statsite are implementations of statsd, so the last 3 options are nearly the same thing.
Once the metrics reach your statsd-compatible agent, they need to be forwarded somewhere so they can be stored and displayed. There are many options. This page discusses a few of the most popular.
Graphite is an open-source tool for storing and graphing time-series data. It doesn't support dashboards or alerts, but Grafana can be layered on top of it.
TICK is an acronym for Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, and Kapacitor. Together they provide a full solution for storing, displaying, and alerting on time-series data. It is available in both open-source and commercial versions from InfluxData.
- Telegraf provides a statsd-compatible host agent.
- InfluxDB is the time-series database.
- Chronograf is a dashboarding engine roughly similar to Grafana.
- Kapacitor provides alerting.
CloudWatch is Amazon's solution for monitoring AWS cloud resources. It handles both time-series data and log files. If you are running Vault and Consul in AWS, it can be an easy choice to make.
One limitation of CloudWatch is that time-series data is only available at a 1-minute granularity and only for 15 days. After that, the data is rolled up into 5-minute and one-hour buckets. For more details, see the CloudWatch FAQ.
Prometheus is a modern alternative to statsd-compatible daemons, using lightweight HTTP servers called "exporters" which are then scraped by a Prometheus server. Prometheus is increasingly popular in the containerized world.
Rather than the UDP-based "fire and forget" mechanism used by statsd, Prometheus relies on lightweight HTTP servers called "exporters" which are then scraped by a Prometheus server. There is a statsd exporter that you could use in place of Telegraf later in this guide.
DataDog is a commercial SaaS solution. They provide a customized statsd agent, DogStatsd, that includes several vendor-specific extensions, mostly tagging and service check results.
If you use DataDog, you would use their DogStatsd in place of Telegraf later in this guide.
There are many other commercial and open-source choices. Configuring those is beyond the scope of this document.
Now that you know what options are available, we can reveal the Architecture chosen for this guide.
This page is part of the Vault and Consul monitoring guide.