Telegraf Agents are a great way to capture OS-level metrics, monitor services and processes, and gain visibility into Applications. We've discussed many of these things already, but in Aria Operations 8.12 (and Aria Operations SaaS January 2023) we now have HA for data collection from Telegraf Agents, implemented via Collector Groups (CG) and a Virtual IP, let's have a look!
I've deployed two new Cloud Proxies (vr-cg-cp-1 and vr-cg-cp-2), I will use these to create the Collector Group for Telegraf Agents. Go to the Collector Groups tab.
Click ADD.
Let's give the new Collector Group a name, description, turn on Application Monitoring High Availability, and assign a VIP. Then drag the two new CPs into the CG, you'll notice that if a CP is already in another CG it's not available for use.
Once done, Click SAVE.
You'll now see the new Cloud Proxy Group along with the Default collector group, and any others you might have configured previously. Once HA Status goes to OK, it's ready for use. Let's install a Telegraf Agent.
Click Install and you are presented with an option to associate your Telegraf Agent with a Cloud Proxy Group with HA or a Cloud Proxy without HA. We'll select the one we just created.
Once done it'll look like this.
As you can see it's using the new Cloud Proxy Group VIP. Note: all VMs in that same vCenter will be installed and associated with that same Cloud Proxy Group. I'm told additional options are coming, but until then, if you'd like to use a different Cloud Proxy Group, just stop/delete the associated ARC-ADAPTER/s and install your Telegram Agent.
Quite an improvement from older releases that required manually load balancing of Telegraf Agents and single point of failures. For more information on Aria Operations check out the VMware Aria Cloud Management YouTube channel!