Setup Telegraf on an Apple M1 Mac Mini

3 min readJan 26, 2022

I’m setting up a couple of Apple M1 Build servers and part of the setup is pushing metrics into Grafana with Telegraf. Here’s my basic install and setup.

Download and Install Telegraf

Down the installer from: https://portal.influxdata.com/downloads
Because this is a M1 Mac mini, I selected macOS ARM64 (via singed .dmg)
Expand dmg and copy Telegraf.app to the “/Applications” folder
Open the Telegraf.app and allow permissions to terminal

*You could also install telegraf with Homebrew, in which case, the same steps work, but you would need to update any paths for the telegraf binary and conf files

Set The config File

I copy the config from a previous install or create /Applications/Telegraf.app/Contents/Resources/etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf if it doesn’t exist
I used the defaults below. Theres nothing fancy going on here, I’m using the defaults from the example conf file. I’m just looking to get basic metrics. You would need to update any relevant information for your environment, like urls for your InfluxDB server

# Telegraf Configuration
 
 # Global tags can be specified here in key="value" format.
 [global_tags]
 
 # Configuration for telegraf agent
 [agent]
   interval = "60s"
   round_interval = true
   metric_batch_size = 1000
   metric_buffer_limit = 10000
   collection_jitter = "0s"
   flush_interval = "10s"
   flush_jitter = "0s"
   precision = "s"
   hostname = ""
   omit_hostname = false
 
 ###################################################################
 #                            OUTPUT PLUGINS                                   #
 ###################################################################
 [[outputs.influxdb]]
   urls = ["http://servername:8086"]
   database = "telegraf"
   timeout = "5s"
 
 
 ###################################################################
 #                            INPUT PLUGINS                                    #
 ###################################################################
 # Read metrics about cpu usage
 # [[inputs.cpu]]
 
 # Read metrics about disk usage by mount point
 [[inputs.disk]]
   ## Ignore mount points by filesystem type.
   ignore_fs = ["tmpfs", "devtmpfs", "devfs", "iso9660", "overlay", "aufs", "squashfs"]
 
 # Get kernel statistics from /proc/stat
 [[inputs.kernel]]
   # no configuration
 
 # Read metrics about memory usage
 [[inputs.mem]]
   # no configuration
 
 # Get the number of processes and group them by status
 [[inputs.processes]]
   # no configuration
 
 # Read metrics about swap memory usage
 [[inputs.swap]]
   # no configuration
 
 # Read metrics about system load & uptime
 [[inputs.system]]
   ## Uncomment to remove deprecated metrics.
   # fielddrop = ["uptime_format"]

Run Manually

To run telegraf manually, open terminal and run: telegraf --config path_to_telegraf.conf . In my case, I use the command below.

/Applications/Telegraf.app/Contents/Resources/usr/bin/telegraf --config /Applications/Telegraf.app/Contents/Resources/etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf

Create A `Launchagent` for Startup

Once you verify telegraf runs and metrics are being sent to your InfluxDB server. You could create a Launchagent to run telegraf as login.

Create a Launchagent for the current user running telegraf.
I copy the below and put it at ~/Library/Launchagents/com.telegraf.plist

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
 <plist version="1.0">
 <dict>
     <key>EnvironmentVariables</key>
     <dict>
         <key>PATH</key>
         <string>/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Library/Apple/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin</string>
     </dict>
     <key>KeepAlive</key>
     <dict>
         <key>SuccessfulExit</key>
         <true/>
     </dict>
     <key>Label</key>
     <string>com.telegraf</string>
     <key>ProgramArguments</key>
     <array>
         <string>/Applications/Telegraf.app/Contents/Resources/usr/bin/telegraf</string>
         <string>--config</string>
         <string>/Applications/Telegraf.app/Contents/Resources/etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf</string>
     </array>
     <key>RunAtLoad</key>
     <true/>
 </dict>
 </plist>

Then I reboot the machine and log into my Grafana server. Duplicate an existing Dashboard from another build server and wait a couple minutes and refresh until I see the new hostname pop up. Then I update all my panels with the new hostname