From 1d0dc3940583e16632dd5ba61a8f7670600dd2bb Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Joshua Powers <powersj@fastmail.com>
Date: Mon, 6 May 2024 03:48:56 -0600
Subject: [PATCH] docs: Add quick start (#15288)

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+# Quick Start
+
+The following demos getting started with Telegraf quickly using Docker to
+monitor the local system.
+
+## Install
+
+This example will use Docker to launch a Telegraf container:
+
+```shell
+docker pull telegraf
+```
+
+Refer to the [Install Guide][] for the full list of ways to install Telegraf.
+
+[Install Guide]: /docs/INSTALL_GUIDE.md
+
+## Configure
+
+Telegraf requires a configuration to start up. A configuration requires at least
+one input to collect data from and one output to send data to. The configuration
+file is a [TOML][] file.
+
+[TOML]: /docs/TOML.md
+
+```sh
+$ cat config.toml
+[[inputs.cpu]]
+[[inputs.mem]]
+[[outputs.file]]
+```
+
+The above enables two inputs, CPU and Memory, and one output file. The inputs
+will collect usage information about the CPU and Memory, while the file output
+is used to print the metrics to STDOUT.
+
+Note that defining plugins to use are a TOML array of tables. This means users
+can define a plugin multiple times. This is more useful with other plugins that
+may need to connect to different endpoints.
+
+## Launch
+
+With the image downloaded and a config file created, launch the image:
+
+```sh
+docker run --rm --volume $PWD/config.toml:/etc/telegraf/telegraf.conf telegraf
+```
+
+The user will see some initial information print out about which config file was
+loaded, version information, and what plugins were loaded. After the initial few
+seconds metrics will start to print out.
+
+## Next steps
+
+To go beyond this quick start, users should consider the following:
+
+1. Determine where you want to collect data or metrics from and look at the
+  available [input plugins][]
+2. Determine where you want to send metrics to and look at the available
+  [output plugins][]
+3. Look at the [install guide][] for the complete list of methods to deploy and
+  install Telegraf
+4. If parsing arbitrary data or sending metrics or logs to Telegraf, read
+  through the [parsing data][] guide.
+
+[input plugins]: /plugins/inputs
+[output plugins]: /plugins/outputs
+[parsing data]: /docs/PARSING_DATA.md