The text discusses collecting running process counts with Telegraf, a tool for data collection and monitoring. The author uses Python and Ubuntu Linux as examples to gather information about running processes using the `ps` command and the `/proc` filesystem. They then use the `exec` input plugin in Telegraf to execute a bash script that runs the `ps` command and outputs the count of running processes with the string "python" to a file. The script is configured to run once per collection interval, and the output is sent to InfluxDB in the value format. The author provides guidance on how to use this setup for monitoring process counts, including setting up alerts based on the metric values.