Telegraf is an agent that collects metrics for sending them to InfluxDB It's written in Go and pretty much works out of the box. Here's how to get it up and running in few minutes.
On a Debian based machine:
wget http://get.influxdb.org/telegraf/telegraf_0.2.4_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i telegraf_0.2.4_amd64.deb
It will now be installed in /opt/telegraf.
Go to /opt/telegraf and create the default config:
./telegraf -sample-config -filter cpu:mem:net:disk:io:netstat -outputfilter influxdb | sudo tee telegraf.conf
Look over the config and update the section that defines how to connect to local influxdb. If your influxdb host is local then no change is needed (provided you use all the defaults). If your influxdb host is remote you'll have to specify its hostname/ip and credentials.
Now, test the config:
./telegraf -config telegraf.conf -test
If the test produced reasonable results, then you can go ahead and copy the config to a place where telegraf expects to find it.
Which, somewhat curiously, is /etc/opt/telegraf/telegraf.conf
sudo cp -v telegraf.conf /etc/opt/telegraf/telegraf.conf
Couldn't be simpler
sudo /etc/init.d/telegraf start
Check that it runs correctly
tail /var/log/telegraf/telegraf.log -f