---
title: Telegraf aggregator and processor plugins
description: Use Telegraf aggregator and processor plugins to aggregate and process data between the input plugins and output plugins.
menu:
  telegraf_1_12:
    name: Aggregator and processor plugins
    weight: 20
    parent: Concepts
---

Besides the input plugins and output plugins, Telegraf includes aggregator and processor plugins, which are used to aggregate and process metrics as they pass through Telegraf.

```
┌───────────┐
│           │
│    CPU    │───┐
│           │   │
└───────────┘   │
                │
┌───────────┐   │                                              ┌───────────┐
│           │   │                                              │           │
│  Memory   │───┤                                          ┌──▶│ InfluxDB  │
│           │   │                                          │   │           │
└───────────┘   │    ┌─────────────┐     ┌─────────────┐   │   └───────────┘
                │    │             │     │Aggregate    │   │
┌───────────┐   │    │Process      │     │ - mean      │   │   ┌───────────┐
│           │   │    │ - transform │     │ - quantiles │   │   │           │
│   MySQL   │───┼──▶ │ - decorate  │────▶│ - min/max   │───┼──▶│   File    │
│           │   │    │ - filter    │     │ - count     │   │   │           │
└───────────┘   │    │             │     │             │   │   └───────────┘
                │    └─────────────┘     └─────────────┘   │
┌───────────┐   │                                          │   ┌───────────┐
│           │   │                                          │   │           │
│   SNMP    │───┤                                          └──▶│   Kafka   │
│           │   │                                              │           │
└───────────┘   │                                              └───────────┘
                │
┌───────────┐   │
│           │   │
│  Docker   │───┘
│           │
└───────────┘
```

**Processor plugins** process metrics as they pass through and immediately emit
results based on the values they process. For example, this could be printing
all metrics or adding a tag to all metrics that pass through.

**Aggregator plugins**, on the other hand, are a bit more complicated. Aggregators
are typically for emitting new _aggregate_ metrics, such as a running mean,
minimum, maximum, quantiles, or standard deviation. For this reason, all _aggregator_
plugins are configured with a `period`. The `period` is the size of the window
of metrics that each _aggregate_ represents. In other words, the emitted
_aggregate_ metric will be the aggregated value of the past `period` seconds.
Since many users will only care about their aggregates and not every single metric
gathered, there is also a `drop_original` argument, which tells Telegraf to only
emit the aggregates and not the original metrics.

**NOTE** Since aggregator plugins only aggregate metrics within their periods,
historical data is not supported. In other words, if your metric timestamp is more
than `now() - period` in the past, it will not be aggregated. If this is a feature
that you need, please comment on this [GitHub issue](https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/issues/1992).