I’m quite a fan of Sonos audio equipment but recently had some trouble with some of the devices glitching and even cutting out whilst playing. Under the covers Sonos stuff is running Linux (of course) and exposes some diagnostics through a rudimentary frontend that you can access at http://<sonos player IP>:1400/support/review: Whilst this gives you the current state, you can’t get historical data on it. It felt like the problems were happening "all the time", but were they actually?

In this article I’m going to show you how to easily monitor the rate at which Logstash is ingesting data, as well as in future articles the rate at which Elasticsearch is indexing it. It’s a nice little touch to add to any project involving Logstash, and it’s easy to do. Logstash is powerful tool for data ingest, processing, and distribution. It originated as simply the pipe to slurp at log files and put them into Elasticsearch, but has evolved into a whole bunch more.

InfluxDB is a great time series database, that’s recently been rebranded as part of the “TICK” stack, including data collectors, visualisation, and ETL/Alerting. I’ve yet to really look at the other components, but InfluxDB alone works just great with my favourite visualisation/analysis tool for time series metrics, Grafana. Getting data into InfluxDB is easy, with many tools supporting the native InfluxDB line input protocol, and those that don’t often supporting the carbon protocol (from Graphite), which InfluxDB also supports (along with others).