description: Documentation for Telegraf, the plugin-driven server agent of the InfluxData time series platform, used to collect and report metrics. Telegraf supports four categories of plugins -- input, output, aggregator, and processor.
Telegraf is a plugin-driven server agent for collecting & reporting metrics,
and is the first piece of the [TICK stack](https://influxdata.com/time-series-platform/).
Telegraf has plugins to source a variety of metrics directly from the system it's running on, pull metrics from third party APIs, or even listen for metrics via a statsd and Kafka consumer services.
It also has output plugins to send metrics to a variety of other datastores, services, and message queues, including InfluxDB, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Datadog, Librato, Kafka, MQTT, NSQ, and many others.
## Key features
Here are some of the features that Telegraf currently supports that make it a great choice for metrics collection.
* Written entirely in Go.
It compiles into a single binary with no external dependencies.
* Minimal memory footprint.
* Plugin system allows new inputs and outputs to be easily added.
* A wide number of plugins for many popular services already exist for well known services and APIs.
