Some time ago I’ve been asked to study and set-up a monitoring solution, to keep in check several SQL Server instances.After a bit of searching around the web I found out that one of the most popular solutions is the TICK stack.
The TICK stack is a set of software developed by InfluxData, each letter of the acronym stands for a software:
- Telegraf, to gather the data
- InfluxDB, to store the data
- Chronograf, to explore data and manage the TICK stack
- Kapacitor, to monitor and alert
Now a brief overview of each component.
Telegraf
Telegraf is a server agent for the collection of metrics, it comes with more than 250 plugins to collect metrics from a great variety of systems and softwares like Windows performance, SQL Server, Docker and more (check github for the full list).
InfluxDB
InfluxDB is a Time Series Database (TSDB), it has been developed specifically to store time series data and to satisfy high write and read loads.It offers two different query language, InfluxQL which has a SQL like syntax and Flux which is still in development and inspired to javascript.
Chronograf
Chronograf is the UI of the TICK stack, it can be used for several tasks like administer InfluxDB and Kapacitor, create dashboards but the most useful feature to me is the possibility to explore and query the data through the UI (so you don’t have to memorize the names of measurements and tags to query your data).
Kapacitor
Kapacitor is a data processing engine for stream and batch data. It is made to perform check on the data and send alerts through different channels like email, Slack, Telegram and more.The alert rules that can be built are fully customizable and can be very complex, to write those rules a specific scripting language, called TICKscript, in future version of InfluxDB, Flux will be the only scripting language for the whole TICK stack.
Why Should you use it
Maybe you are wondering why should you use it, here are a few reason:
- Free
- Multi Platform
- Open Source
The whole TICK stack is completely free and open source, you can have a look at it on github. Behind it there is an active community which asks, propose and implement new fixes and features.
Another great pro for the TICK stack is it’s multiplatformness, in fact every component is available on:
- Linux (several distributions)
- Windows (32 & 64 bit)
- Mac OS X
- Docker (official docker containers)
The SQL Dump 