Telegraf is an agent that runs on the operating system of choice, gathering metrics and events from various sources and sending them to one or more sinks such as InfluxDB or Kafka. It supports multiple inputs, including over 200 plugins for retrieving information from applications, hardware, and software. To run Telegraf on Windows, download the Windows binaries from the official website, extract the archive into the Program Files folder, create a conf subdirectory, and copy the telegraf.conf as conf\inputs.conf. The outputs section of the file is then configured to send data to InfluxDB Cloud specifically, using credentials such as a token, organization name, and bucket name. To install Telegraf as a Windows service, run the command .\telegraf --service install --config-directory 'C:\Program Files\telegraf\conf'. The Telegraf service can be started with the command net start. To use an input plugin, such as the Docker input plugin, enable it in the telegraf.conf file by copying configuration code from the GitHub repository into the inputs.conf file. This allows users to switch on the plugin without installing it, as it is already part of the product.