Orchestrating an observability platform

Building a platform like the one described in this book may seem easy to accomplish on a small scale (for example, the lab scenarios). However, in real environments, scaling it by hand may seem daunting. That is where infrastructure automation and orchestration come to the rescue.

The idea of orchestration within automation is that you define your patterns on a small scale. Then, you scale out those patterns on the whole platform side of things to accomplish the larger goal. Orchestration is what takes these modern telemetry and observability tools, which are great on a small scale, and makes them extremely powerful platforms at scale.

Let’s take a look at how this works with one of the tools we have covered, the Telegraf collector. As you learned in Chapter 5, Telegraf requires a configuration file that tells an agent which targets (i.e., network devices) and methods must be used to collect data. At scale, this means that you need...