Install telegraf with Homebrew, apk, chocolatey, MacPorts, Nix, scoop, winget, zypper

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• telegraf

Project history

InfluxData says it released Telegraf in 2015 as a lightweight, plugin-driven collection agent written in Go and designed around tagged measurements used by InfluxDB and OpenTSDB. The project grew inside the InfluxData ecosystem alongside the TICK stack.

The Telegraf 1.0 announcement described it as InfluxDB's native data collector and the first step of the TICK stack. At that point, the project had grown from a small number of input and output plugins into a broad open source agent with many contributors and plugin types.

Adoption history

Telegraf's adoption followed its plugin model. Official docs describe input, output, aggregator, processor, and secretstore plugin categories, and InfluxData's product page now presents Telegraf as an open source agent with hundreds of community-tested plugins.

Because it could output beyond InfluxDB and integrate with infrastructure, applications, cloud services, message queues, and edge devices, Telegraf became common in package repositories across Unix, Windows, and container workflows.

How it is used

Users normally generate or edit a TOML configuration, enable input and output plugins, and run the telegraf daemon as a service. Official docs show `telegraf config > telegraf.conf` as the standard way to generate a configuration file from the available plugins.

In package-manager culture, Telegraf is valued for being a boring, service-friendly collector: install it, place config under `/etc/telegraf`, drop fragments into `telegraf.d`, and let it feed the telemetry backend.

Why package nerds care

Telegraf is significant because it turns a large observability integration surface into one package. Formula maintainers care about its build, plugin set, service files, config paths, and release cadence because those determine whether fleet installs behave predictably.

It also illustrates a packaging pattern common in infrastructure tooling: a single Go binary with a large plugin catalog and a stable text configuration format becomes the portable unit that package managers distribute.

Timeline

• 2015: InfluxData releases Telegraf as a lightweight Go collection agent.
• 2016: Telegraf 1.0 GA is announced as InfluxDB's native data collector and the first step of the TICK stack.
• 2020s: Telegraf expands into a broad telemetry agent with hundreds of plugins and multi-backend output support.
• 2026: Telegraf v1.39.1 is published in the official GitHub releases.

Related projects

• InfluxDB is Telegraf's original and primary ecosystem partner.
• Kapacitor and Chronograf are related TICK stack components.
• Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry collectors, and vendor agents occupy adjacent telemetry collection niches.

Sources

• https://docs.influxdata.com/telegraf/v1/configuration/
• https://docs.influxdata.com/telegraf/v1/plugins/
• https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/releases/tag/v1.39.1
• https://www.influxdata.com/blog/announcing-telegraf-1-0-the-plugin-driven-agent-for-collecting-metrics/
• https://www.influxdata.com/blog/telegraf-go-collection-agent/
• https://www.influxdata.com/time-series-platform/telegraf/