Community-contributed plugin installation on the official Telegraf app

[MichaelEjigu]

Hello all 

New CtrlX user here! 
Has anybody had any experience with installing community-contributed plugin on the official Telegraf app? 
I'm using version 2.4.0+1.28.2 of Telegraf 

Best regards, 

Michael

[Sgilk]

Hi @MichaelEjigu ,

Unfortunately, installation of community-contributed or any plugin not included with the built snap is not supported. The plugins must be included during the compilation process. If you'd like to install a non-supported plugin, you will need to build from source. The list of included plugins can be found here: ctrlX Telegraf Plugins

That being said, there are a large number of plugins included with the current build. Here is a snippet from the Telegraf diagnostic logs.

Available plugins: 241 inputs, 9 aggregators, 30 processors, 24 parsers, 60 outputs, 6 secret-stores

 Here is an example configuration utilizing the MQTT output and the ctrlX datalayer input plugins.

[[outputs.mqtt]]
  servers = ["192.168.1.200:1883"]
  username = "sgilk"
  password = "sgilk"
  insecure_skip_verify = false
  topic = 'telegraf/{{ .PluginName}}/{{ .Tag "measurement"}}'
  layout = "field"
## Configure the input plugin with the username and password to ctrlX Core  
[[inputs.ctrlx_datalayer]]
   ## Hostname or IP address of ctrlX CORE
   server = "localhost"

   ## Authentication credentials
   username = "boschrexroth"
   password = "boschrexroth"

   ## Use TLS but skip chain & host verification
   insecure_skip_verify = true
   [[inputs.ctrlx_datalayer.subscription]]
      ## The name of the measurement. (default: "ctrlx")
      measurement = "metrics"

      nodes=[
         {name="cpu_usage_percent", address="framework/metrics/system/cpu-utilisation-percent"}
      ]

[MichaelEjigu]

Thank you for your feedback, I will check out the listed plugins and maybe create a feature request (once I find out how) if the pre-included plugins are not sufficient. Being able to integrate plugins as a user would also allow to update plugins at a faster rate than the official app updates. 
I am not familiar enough with telegraf yet to judge if this is even technically feasible

I will accept your reply as a solution once i have figured out how to create a feature request

Thanks again 

[Sgilk · Accepted solution]

@MichaelEjigu,

The technical problem is that Telegraf is written in Go and compiles to a single binary. To execute this in ctrlX OS, it must be packaged as an Ubuntu snap. If a plugin needs to be added, the Telegraf source must be recompiled and packaged as a new snap.

The good news is that Telegraf (and the ctrlX fork) is open source. You can take this, add your custom plugin, recompile and package as a custom snap to install on the ctrlX OS system.

[MichaelEjigu]

Great! 

Thanks again 
Michael