Telegraf is an impressive piece of software. Written in Go and maintained by InfluxData, it supports over 300 input plugins and can ship data to dozens of output targets. OxiPulse covers exactly one input (system metrics) and exactly one output (OTLP/gRPC). The comparison is not competitive — they solve different problems.
Resource usage
Telegraf's Go binary with a minimal config typically uses 30–80 MB of RAM and 0.1–0.5% CPU. That is acceptable on most servers but noticeable on constrained hardware.
OxiPulse uses under 8 MB of RAM and under 0.05% CPU in steady state. The difference matters on a $4 VPS, a Raspberry Pi, or an edge device where every megabyte counts.
Protocol support
| OxiPulse | Telegraf | |
|---|---|---|
| OTLP/gRPC | ✓ native | ✓ via plugin |
| Prometheus remote write | — | ✓ |
| InfluxDB line protocol | — | ✓ native |
| Kafka, MQTT, AMQP | — | ✓ |
| OpenTelemetry (input) | — | ✓ |
Telegraf's output breadth is unmatched. If you need to write to InfluxDB, Kafka, and an S3 bucket simultaneously, Telegraf is the right tool.
Plugin ecosystem
Telegraf's 300+ input plugins cover databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis), cloud providers (AWS CloudWatch, GCP Stackdriver), network equipment, custom scripts, and more. OxiPulse collects only CPU, RAM, disk, and network from the host OS.
If you need to correlate application metrics with system metrics in the same pipeline, Telegraf gives you that in one agent.
Offline resilience
Neither Telegraf nor most of its output plugins buffer metrics across restarts by default. OxiPulse has a built-in ring buffer that stores up to 24 hours of snapshots in memory and flushes them when the ingestor reconnects.
Auto-update
Telegraf is distributed via package managers (apt, yum). Updates require a package manager
invocation or a CI pipeline. OxiPulse checks GitHub Releases 5 minutes after startup and
replaces itself automatically.
When to choose Telegraf
- You already use InfluxDB or the TICK stack
- You need metrics from databases, message brokers, or custom scripts alongside system metrics
- Your team is comfortable operating a more complex configuration
When to choose OxiPulse
- You want a drop-in agent with zero configuration complexity
- Resource footprint is a constraint
- You use an OTLP-compatible backend (Grafana, Honeycomb, Datadog, SecuryBlack)
- You want automatic updates and offline resilience out of the box