Scraping and Discovery

Pull data from a dynamic list of remote targets with Kapacitor’s discovery and scraping features. Use those features with Kapacitor’s TICKscripts to monitor targets, process the data, and write data to InfluxDB. Currently, Kapacitor supports only Prometheus style targets.

Note: Scraping and discovery is currently under technical preview. There may be changes to the configuration and behavior in subsequent releases.

Content

• Overview
• Configuring Scrapers and Discoverers

Overview

The diagram above outlines the infrastructure for discovering and scraping data with Kapacitor.

First, Kapacitor implements the discovery process to identify the available targets in your infrastructure. It requests that information at regular intervals and receives that information from an authority. In the diagram, the authority informs Kapacitor of three targets: A, B, and C.

Next, Kapacitor implements the scraping process to pull metrics data from the existing targets. It runs the scraping process at regular intervals. Here, Kapacitor requests metrics from targets A, B, and C. The application running on A, B, and C exposes a /metrics endpoint on its HTTP API which returns application-specific statistics.

Finally, Kapacitor processes the data according to your configured TICKscripts. Use TICKscripts to filter, transform, and perform other tasks on your metrics data. In addition, if you’d like to store your data, configure a TICKscript to send them to InfluxDB.

Pushing vs. Pulling Metrics

By combining discovery with scraping, Kapacitor enables your metrics gathering infrastructure to pull metrics off of targets instead of requiring them to push metrics out to InfluxDB. Pulling metrics has several advantages in dynamic environments where a target may have a short lifecycle.

Configuring Scrapers and Discoverers

A single scraper scrapes the targets from a single discoverer. Configuring both scrapers and discoverers comes down to configuring each individually and then informing the scraper about the discoverer.

Below are all the configuration options for a scraper.

[[scraper]]
  enabled = false
  name = "myscraper"
  # ID of the discoverer to use
  discoverer-id = ""
  # The kind of discoverer to use
  discoverer-service = ""
  db = "mydb"
  rp = "myrp"
  type = "prometheus"
  scheme = "http"
  metrics-path = "/metrics"
  scrape-interval = "1m0s"
  scrape-timeout = "10s"
  username = ""
  password = ""
  bearer-token = ""
  ssl-ca = ""
  ssl-cert = ""
  ssl-key = ""
  ssl-server-name = ""
  insecure-skip-verify = false

Available Discoverers

Kapacitor supports the following service for discovery:

Name	Description
azure	Discover targets hosted in Azure.
consul	Discover targets using Consul service discovery.
dns	Discover targets via DNS queries.
ec2	Discover targets hosted in AWS EC2.
file-discovery	Discover targets listed in files.
gce	Discover targets hosted in GCE.
kubernetes	Discover targets hosted in Kubernetes.
marathon	Discover targets using Marathon service discovery.
nerve	Discover targets using Nerve service discovery.
serverset	Discover targets using Serversets service discovery.
static-discovery	Statically list targets.
triton	Discover targets using Triton service discovery.

See the example configuration file for details on configuring each discoverer.