Telegraf

Judgement

What it is

Complete system

What it does

A plugin-driven agent that collects metrics and logs from systems, databases, MQTT, Modbus, OPC UA and more, and writes them to InfluxDB, Prometheus and other outputs.

Adopt it when

You need to gather metrics from many kinds of systems, including industrial equipment, with one agent.

Watch out

Configuration files for many plugins get long, and defaults lean toward InfluxDB.

Ready for

Production-ready

Runs as

Self-hosted server

Built with

Go

How established

Established: started 11 years ago, latest release v1.40.3.

What the license allows

You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.

Judged on 2026-11-03 from the project's README and GitHub data. The license and age lines are worked out directly.

Compare Telegraf

Built from

Follow it down: Telegraf → Go → runs on a microchip

How compilers were built, back to punched paper tape

Open-source alternatives to Telegraf

1. 1
   Vector vectordotdev

   A high-performance observability data pipeline.

   Complete system Production-ready You need a fast, single-binary agent or aggregator to reshape and ship telemetry, for example to cut observability costs.

   ★ 23k MPL-2.0 Rust Active, pushed today
2. 2
   Fluentd fluent

   Fluentd: Unified Logging Layer (project under CNCF)

   Complete system Production-ready You need a central log aggregator with plugins for unusual sources or destinations.

   ★ 14k Apache-2.0 Ruby Active, pushed yesterday
3. 3
   Fluent Bit fluent

   Fast and Lightweight Logs, Metrics and Traces processor for Linux, BSD, OSX and Windows

   Complete system Production-ready You need a light log and metrics shipper on many machines or containers.

   ★ 8.2k Apache-2.0 C Active, pushed today
4. 4
   OpenTelemetry Collector open-telemetry

   OpenTelemetry Collector

   Building block Production-ready You instrument with OpenTelemetry and want one pipeline to route telemetry to one or more backends.

   ★ 7.7k Apache-2.0 Go Active, pushed today
5. 5
   Logkit qiniu

   Very powerful server agent for collecting & sending logs & metrics with an easy-to-use web console.

   Building block Usable Only if you already run it.

   ★ 1.4k Apache-2.0 Go Quiet, pushed 2 years ago
6. 6
   Logagent-js sematext

   Extensible log shipper with input/output plugins, buffering, parsing, data masking, and small memory/CPU footprint

   Building block Usable Only if you already use it; Fluent Bit or Vector are better maintained.

   ★ 391 Apache-2.0 JavaScript Quiet, pushed 2 years ago
7. 7
   Octopussy Octopussy-Project

   Octopussy - Open Source Log Management Solution

   Complete system Experimental Not for new deployments.

   ★ 164 GPL-3.0 Perl Quiet, pushed 6 years ago

Commercial telemetry collectors and pipelines

1. 1
   Datadog Observability Pipelines Datadog, Inc.

   Control costs, simplify SIEM migrations, and manage sensitive data at scale

   Complete system Production-ready You already pay for Datadog and want to control log volume or move data between SIEMs without adding another vendor.

   Commercial
2. 2
   Cribl Stream Cribl

   Collect, reduce, and shape your data with Cribl Stream. Our product offers a simple way to drive your data engine forward. Start streaming today.

   Complete system Production-ready Your log ingest bill is large and you want to cut, reshape or split data before it reaches expensive analytics tools.

   Commercial