[mhall119]

InfluxData doesn't make money from Telegraf at all. It fills a need (data collection) that InfluxDB users have, so it helps them which helps us, but it also helps our competitors whose users also use Telegraf to collect data.

The reason merges have been a problem is that historically there was only a couple of people involved in the project doing all of the code reviews, and new plugins are usually large chunks of new code that interact with products or protocols those reviewers aren't familiar with, so there is a steep learning curve just to properly review code contributions.

Last year we formed a new maintainers team that is a mix of InfluxData staff and community contributors who are working together to review and land code changes. This has significantly increased the rate they're getting through PRs but there's still a very large backlog to get through, plus new stuff coming in all the time.

Anybody who wants to see new code and plugins land in Telegraf faster can ask to join the maintainers team. You'll need to be familiar with the codebase and willing to work on any plugins of functionality that come in (a lot of plugins come from people building things for their own job/product).