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Version: 1.2.0

Example: Ingesting Data

This section will help you get started with devices to ingest data with specific protocols, walking you through a common use case.

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For a detailed discussion of devices, see this section.

Scenario​

Use UDP as the listening protocol.

Setup and Trial​

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We will create a device that will receive data from Syslog using an insecure UDP connection.

Create the device configuration​

Create a file named from-syslog-udp.yml in our working directory, and then open it with a text editor to enter the following:

from-syslog-udp.yml
devices:
  - id: 1
    name: from_syslog_udp
    type: syslog
    status: true
    properties:
      protocol: udp
      address: 127.0.0.1
      port: 514

This YAML code specifies that this is a Syslog device, that it will use UDP as its protocol, and that it will be listening on port 514. You can enter any integer as the id value.

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However, we also need to define a target that the ingested data willl be directed to, and a route combining the device and the target.

Create a file named to-console.yml and add the following target definition to it:

to-console.yml
targets:
  - name: to_console
    status: true
    type: console

Now create a file named syslog-to-console.yml and add the following route definition to it.

syslog-to-console.yml
routes:
  - name: syslog_to_console
    devices:
      - name: from_syslog_udp
    targets:
      - name: to_console
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To see the ingested data, your must route the stream to a specific destination! For a detailed discussion of Routes, see this section.

We are now ready to try our configuration.

Run the UDP device​

Open a terminal and enter the following in the command line to start Director:

.\vmetric-director -background

This will start Director as a background process which you can verify as indicated before. Now enter:

.\vmetric-director -console

The -console switch will print status messages to the terminal.

After you press Enter, you will see a stream of initialization messages and our device will be spawned off, waiting to receive Syslog messages.

Run the configuration​

We can now run the reception using Director's cross-platform generator mode.

Open a new terminal and enter the following in the command line:

  • Using generator mode
.\vmetric-director -generator -now -mode syslog -count 1 -address "127.0.0.1:514" -message="Hello world"
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If you are using the generator mode, after you press Enter the program will start sending our message, one at a time, to Syslog. It will signal that it sent the message with a prompt like this:

1 message sent successfully in 11 ms with 0 error(s) at 2025-06-02 01:54:02.0349011 +0300 +03 m=+2.821324601
2 messages sent successfully since 2025-06-02 01:54:00 +0300 +03

After sending a limited number of messages—say 5 of them—press Ctrl+C to exit the process.

If you now switch back to Director's terminal, you will see each sent message (i.e. "Hello world") as received on the console:

<1> 2025-06-02T08:33:28+03:00 VirtualMetric Test[3872]: Hello world

Monitoring​

Check that the example worked by verifying:

  • Messages appeared in Director's console output
  • No error files in the directory indicated here

If you see the "Hello world" messages displayed, data ingestion is working correctly.

In the next section, we will create a secure device to ingest the data.