SHSelfHostIndex

Process Exporter vs Telegraf

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
PR Process Exporter Prometheus exporter for per-process metrics VS TE Telegraf Plugin-driven server agent for collecting metrics
FeatureProcess ExporterTelegraf
Deploy effortUnder-an-hour setupUnder-an-hour setup
Health score25 · At risk95 · Excellent
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseMITMIT
LanguageGoGo
Setup difficultyMediumEasy
Min. RAM64 MB64 MB
Deploymentdocker, binarydocker, kubernetes, binary
GitHub stars★ 2,155★ 17,825
First released20162015
ReplacesDatadog AgentDatadog Agent

What are Process Exporter and Telegraf?

Process Exporter

process-exporter exposes per-process and per-process-group CPU, memory, and IO metrics for Prometheus. It enables fine-grained resource attribution on busy hosts.

  • Per-process metrics
  • Process group aggregation
  • CPU, memory, IO data
  • Prometheus compatible

Telegraf

Telegraf is a plugin-driven agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics and events. It has hundreds of input and output plugins covering systems, databases, IoT sensors, and cloud services.

  • Hundreds of input plugins
  • Single static binary
  • Low resource footprint
  • Outputs to many backends

Read the full Telegraf guide →

Process Exporter vs Telegraf: key differences

Both projects are written in Go. Telegraf has the considerably larger community, at 17,825 GitHub stars versus 2,155.

Why pick each one

Choose Process Exporter if…

  • Released under the MIT license
  • First-class Docker support for quick deployment
  • Active community (2.2k GitHub stars)
  • Written in Go
Process Exporter details

Choose Telegraf if…

  • Huge plugin catalog
  • Trivial to deploy

Watch out for

  • Configuration can get verbose
  • No built-in UI
Telegraf details

Frequently asked questions

Is Process Exporter or Telegraf better?

Telegraf is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler easy setup. Consider Process Exporter if its specific feature set fits your needs better.

Are Process Exporter and Telegraf free and open-source?

Yes. Process Exporter is licensed under MIT and Telegraf under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Process Exporter and Telegraf with Docker?

Process Exporter: yes. Telegraf: yes.

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