One critical component of a monitoring system is a data collection or aggregation layer. A very common design here is to use a client-server model so that multiple independent metric gathering services communicate with a centralized system for processing and interpretation.
InfluxDB is a time-series database designed specifically for efficiently ingesting performance metrics from varying sources. One of these just happens to be Telegraf, which we introduced in previous recipes. A common Telegraf + InfluxDB cluster may look like this, with InfluxDB running on a single monitoring server, as seen in this familiar diagram:
InfluxDB acts as a data-gathering and centralization repository so data visualization tools and trend analysis software can produce trend information, graphs, dashboards, alerts, and other useful elements for server management...