Learn how to send data directly to the Wavefront service.

You use the direct data ingestion mechanism to send data directly to the Wavefront service instead of a proxy. While the Wavefront proxy has many benefits, direct data ingestion can be the best approach for some use cases.

Note: You need Direct Data Ingestion permissions to perform direct data ingestion.

Background

Wavefront currently expects that your host, application, or custom code send metrics to a Wavefront proxy installed in your environment. The proxy forwards metrics to the Wavefront service. In production environments, two proxies behind a load balancer guarantee availability and prevent data loss.

proxies behind load balancer

Because some customers told us they’d like to send data directly to the Wavefront service, we’re now making this functionality available.

Example Commands

The following examples illustrate how to send data to Wavefront.

  • An API token is required. Referred to as <<TOKEN>> in the examples.
  • You must know your Wavefront domain name. These examples use mydomain.wavefront.com.
  • Currently, we support only Wavefront Data Format, which is named wavefront. If you don’t specify f=wavefront, we still use that format.

Multiple Data Points

Assume wavefront.txt contains 1 or more lines in the Wavefront data format. You can send it to Wavefront like this:

cat wavefront.txt | curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <<TOKEN>>" -F file=@- https://mydomain.wavefront.com/report

Single Data Point

You can send a single data point like this:

echo "hello.world 1 source=<myhost>" | curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <<TOKEN>>" --data @- https://mydomain.wavefront.com/report

Histogram Distribution

You can perform direct ingestion of histogram distributions in histogram distribution format. You cannot perform direct ingestion of histogram data in Wavefront data format.

Here’s a simple example:

echo '!M #20 30 #10 5 request.latency source=appServer1 region=us-west' | curl -H "Authorization: Bearer <<TOKEN>>" --data @- https://mydomain.wavefront.com/report?f=histogram

Note that:

  • The histogram feature requires a separate license and is not enabled on your cluster by default.
  • You enclose the distribution in single quotes and use the histogram distribution format.
  • You must include f=histogram to ensure the input is treated as a histogram distribution.

Comparing Proxy and Direct Ingestion

Direct ingestion has some benefits, but also some limitations:

  • No disk queueing
  • No rate limiting
  • No blacklist or whitelist
  • No preprocessor
  • Only Wavefront data format is currently supported. No support for OpenTSB, JSON, and Pickle
  • No support for log ingestion

Some limitations, for example supported data formats, might be resolved in the future, but other limitations are benefits of the Wavefront proxy.

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