Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Telegraf VS collectd

Compare Telegraf VS collectd and see what are their differences

Telegraf logo Telegraf

Telegraf is the Agent for Collecting & Reporting Metrics & Data.

collectd logo collectd

System and applications metrics collector
  • Telegraf Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-20
  • collectd Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-12-17

Telegraf features and specs

  • Wide Plugin Support
    Telegraf offers a broad range of input and output plugins, allowing easy integration with various data sources and storage solutions.
  • Open Source
    Being open-source allows users to modify and extend the tool according to their needs without licensing costs.
  • Lightweight and Efficient
    Telegraf is designed to be lightweight, consuming minimal resources while efficiently collecting data from multiple sources.
  • Part of the TICK Stack
    As part of the TICK Stack, Telegraf integrates seamlessly with InfluxDB, Chronograf, and Kapacitor, enabling full-fledged time-series data management and monitoring solutions.
  • Flexible Configuration
    Telegraf provides a simple and flexible configuration process, utilizing a single configuration file to set up various plugins and options.

Possible disadvantages of Telegraf

  • Learning Curve
    For users unfamiliar with Telegraf or the TICK Stack, there is a learning curve associated with understanding its setup and configuration.
  • Limited Built-in Data Processing
    Telegraf primarily focuses on data collection and forwarding, offering limited capabilities for processing data within the tool itself compared to some competitors.
  • Dependence on External Tools
    To perform advanced data analytics or visualization, Telegraf needs to be used in conjunction with other tools like InfluxDB and Grafana, increasing dependencies.
  • Potential Configuration Complexity
    As the number of plugins and integrations grows, managing the configuration files can become complex and challenging to maintain.

collectd features and specs

  • Lightweight
    collectd is designed to be a lightweight system statistics collection service, consuming minimal system resources while providing detailed metrics data.
  • Extensibility
    collectd supports a wide range of plugins that allow for extensive customization and the ability to gather metrics from various sources, such as network interfaces, CPU usage, and disk performance.
  • High Performance
    collectd is capable of collecting and transferring a large number of metrics with very low overhead, making it suitable for performance-critical environments.
  • Open Source
    As an open-source project, collectd benefits from continuous contributions from the community, ensuring it remains up-to-date with the latest technology and requirements.
  • Wide Ecosystem
    collectd integrates well with various data visualization and storage systems such as InfluxDB, Grafana, and Prometheus, allowing for seamless data analysis and visualization.

Possible disadvantages of collectd

  • Complex Configuration
    Setting up and configuring collectd can be complex, especially for new users, due to the extensive configuration options and the need for understanding its plugin architecture.
  • Limited Documentation
    While collectd has some documentation available, it can sometimes be insufficient or challenging to navigate, which might hinder effective troubleshooting or advanced usage.
  • Plugin Stability
    Not all collectd plugins are equally maintained, leading to potential stability issues, particularly if using less popular or outdated plugins.
  • Lack of Built-in Alerting
    collectd focuses on data collection and does not include built-in alerting capabilities, requiring additional tools and integration to set up a comprehensive monitoring solution.
  • Steep Learning Curve
    Due to its broad capabilities and the need for custom configuration, new users may experience a steep learning curve when first adopting collectd.

Telegraf videos

Intro to InfluxDB & Telegraf | Getting Started [4 of 7]

More videos:

  • Review - System Metrics Monitoring with Grafana,Telegraf, Influxdb and Docker : Beautiful Grafana Dashboards
  • Review - David McKay [InfluxData] | The Telegraf Toolbelt: It Can Do That, Really? | InfluxDays SF 2019

collectd videos

How To Install and Configure ‘Collectd’ and ‘Collectd Web’ To Monitor Server Resources on ubuntu 16

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Telegraf and collectd)
Monitoring Tools
45 45%
55% 55
Log Management
46 46%
54% 54
Performance Monitoring
51 51%
49% 49
Application Performance Monitoring

User comments

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, collectd seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 6 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Telegraf mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Telegraf yet. Tracking of Telegraf recommendations started around Mar 2021.

collectd mentions (6)

  • μMon: Stupid simple monitoring
    Https://collectd.org/ does the gathering (and writing to RRDTool database, if you so desire) part very well. Many plugins, easy to add more (just return one line of text) Still need RRD viewere but that's not a huge stack And it scales all the way to hundreds of hosts, as on top of network send/receive of stats it supports few other write formats aside from just RRD files. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • μMon: Stupid simple monitoring
    Why not use https://collectd.org/ which is in C and used by openwrt's luci already along with rrdtool, small in size, low on resource, and has so many plugins already? - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Post Mortem on Mastodon Outage with 30k users
    Then you will have same problems but now you can bother manufacturer about it! Also unless there is something horribly wrong about how often data is written, that SSD should run for ages. We ran (for a test) consumer SSDs in busy ES cluster and they still lasted like 2 years just fine The whole setup was a bit of overcomplicated too. RAID10 with 5+1 or 7+1 (yes Linux can do 7 drive RAID10) with hotspare woud've... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • IT Pro Tuesday #217 - Python Frameworks, Logging Tutorial, Android Terminal & More
    Collectd pulls metrics from the OS, applications, logfiles and external devices for use in monitoring systems, finding performance bottlenecks and capacity planning. Hombre_sabio explains, "Collectd is a tiny daemon that gathers information from a system. It enables mechanisms to collect and observe the values in different techniques. It is an open-source monitoring tool to retrieve and manage SNMP master agents.". Source: over 2 years ago
  • CPU Performance of a docker minecraft java server on Raspberry Pi 4
    For metrics storage I'm using a Graphite database and the graph UI itself is Grafana. To get these I'm using the Debian repos they supply with mostly off-the-shelf configs. For collecting metrics from the Pi to send to Graphite I use collectd. It has a lot of off-the-shelf plugins you can use to grab metrics like CPU usage & load average, network in/out, memory stats etc. The Minecraft-specific stuff you can get... Source: over 3 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Telegraf and collectd, you can also consider the following products

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

Fluent Bit - Data collector and log forwarder

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

Nagios - Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

StatsD - Simple daemon for easy stats aggregation.

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