InfluxDB & Grafana@ OC Tanner

by Pedro Salgado

1-slide intro to InfluxDB• “InfluxDB is a time series, metrics, and analytics database.

• It’s written in Go and has no external dependencies.

• That means once you install it there’s nothing else to manage (such as Redis, ZooKeeper, Cassandra, HBase, or anything else).

• InfluxDB is targeted at use cases for DevOps, metrics, sensor data, and real-time analytics.

• It arose from our need for a database like this on more than a few previous products we’ve built.”

• source: influxdb.com

– Mark Twain

“Get your facts first,

then you can distort them as you please.”

Time-series• “A time series is a sequence of data points, typically

consisting of successive measurements made over a time interval.

• Examples of time series are ocean tides, counts of sunspots, and the daily closing value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

• Time series are very frequently plotted via line charts.”

• source: wikipedia

Data point

• “In statistics, a data point or observation is a set of one or more measurements on a single member of a statistical population.“

• source: wikipedia

Measurement

• “Measurement is the assignment of a number to a characteristic of an object or event, which can be compared with other objects or events.

• The scope and application of a measurement is dependent on the context and discipline.

• source: wikipedia

Example in InfluxDB terms• time series

• internal and external temperature for machine X type Y in time interval

• measurement : temperature

• tag set : machine, type

• field set : internal_temperature, external_temperature

• temperature,machine=unit42,type=assembly internal=32,external=100 1434055562000000035

• filtering done on tags

• computation / analysis done on fields

• fields aren’t indexed

• data written using line protocol

• [key] [point] [timestamp]

• key = <measurement>,<tag set>

• temperature,machine=unit42,type=assembly

• point = <field set>

• internal=32,external=100

• timestamp

• 1434055562000000035

• there can only be one point for a series and timestamp

• you define precision of point (s, ms, μs, ns)

• you define how long data is kept : retention policy (replication, duration)

Other interesting features

• continuous queries

• clustering (alpha)

Grafana

• “An open source, feature rich metrics dashboard and graph editor for Graphite, InfluxDB & OpenTSDB”

• source: grafana.org

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_series

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_point

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement

• https://influxdb.com/docs/v0.9/introduction/overview.html

• https://influxdb.com/docs/v0.9/concepts/glossary.html

• http://grafana.org/

• https://github.com/steenzout/

– Dr Seuss

“Don't cry because it's over,

smile because it happened.”