You can send custom metrics through various data collectors/aggregators.

Data format

The format of a payload looks like this:

name: Description and namespace for the metric.
tags: Key/Value string pairs and usually used to identify the metric.
fields: Key/Value pairs that are typed and usually contain the metric data.
timestamp: Date and time associated with the fields.

Serialization

An example of it in JSON serialization looks like the one you sent in the Getting started tutorial:

{
  "name": "tutorial",
  "timestamp": 1628044399,
  "tags": {
    "color": "red" 
  }, 
  "fields": { 
    "cpu": 12.66 
  }
}

We are actively adding new serialization formats.

Endpoint

Send them as POST requests to https://ingest.terrastruct.com with your API key as the authorization header:

Authorization

Authorization: Bearer <api-token>

You can find your API token by going into the HTTP integration modal.

Open source collectors

One of the most popular open-source data collectors out there is Telegraf.

The easiest way to get started with Telegraf is to start sending CPU readings from a machine.

1. Install it here for the platform of the machine you want to collect data from.
2. Download or copy the contents of this gist. It is a configuration template that'll tell Telegraf to collect CPU data every 10s and send to Terrastruct in JSON. Don't forget to replace the API key with your own.

📘

Telegraf configuration

You can view the full configuration for Telegraf here.

3. Run Telegraf with the configurations from (2). Platform-specific instructions for running Telegraf found here.
4. Explore the various plugins that let you collect more than CPU data. For example, Telegraf has a Statsd input plugin that lets your application metrics to be sent via Statsd to Terrastruct (example config here).

With that, you should start to see metrics streaming in from Telegraf!