[pve-devel] Telegraf added in-built Proxmox support - thoughts versus our external metric support?

[Thomas Lamprecht]

Hi,

On 07.09.20 03:42, Victor Hooi wrote:
> I know that Proxmox has it's own inbuilt InfluxDB client:
> 
> https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/External_Metric_Server
> 
> However, Telegraf recently added first-party support for Proxmox:
> 
> https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/tree/master/plugins/inputs/proxmox

great!

> Telegraf lets you output to InfluxDB, Graphite, Prometheus, as well as a
> bunch of others (Telegraf in-built output clients
> <https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/tree/master/plugins/outputs>)
> 
> What do you think of using the above and contributing to that, instead of
> maintaining our own Proxmox InfluxDB support?
> 
> Or are there advantages to maintaining our own code here?

The pvestatd, which queries statistics periodically, does also the sending
of said statistics without extra overhead. API request may get, at least
partially, up to date information with an extra overhead, e.g., if storage
stats are to be queried too. That could be addressed by providing a pvestatd
fed cache in /run (fast memory tmpfs) or so and provide access to that over
the API.

Anyway, I do not think that we should drop our direct plugins (yet), some
people like me, are happy feeding directly to InfluxDB without anything
in-between.

But, we definitively want to mention this in the documentation and see how
we can improve integration.

cheers,
Thomas