April 2016 Summaries

In this post, we recap the week’s most interesting InfluxDB and TICK-stack related issues, workarounds, time range and timestamps how-tos and Q&A from GitHub, IRC and the InfluxDB Google Group that you might have missed. By default, InfluxQL queries cover the time range between epoch 0 and now(). To query data that occurs in the future, you can use `now() + x` to specify a specific date or `156w` to span 156 weeks from now. The functions `first()` and `last()` return epoch 0 by default, but workarounds using `LIMIT` and sorting queries can be used to get the first and last timestamps in your data. InfluxDB version 0.13 will have a new function called `elapsed()`, which returns the difference between subsequent timestamps in a single field.

InfluxDB has been featured in various announcements, including a free virtual training on April 28 for continuous queries and retention policies, as well as upcoming training sessions in San Francisco and New York City. The company's tech tips have also been published, covering topics such as getting movie ratings data into InfluxDB with the Wire Protocol. Additionally, customers like Football Addicts and iOffer have shared their success stories with using InfluxDB for monitoring and gathering metrics of their notifications systems and user engagement metrics respectively. Another customer, WEGA, has implemented a web filtering solution that uses InfluxDB to report blocked pages and requested content in real-time. InfluxDB's capabilities and ease of use have been highlighted through testimonials from these customers. The company is also hosting various events, including virtual training sessions and meetups, and is offering a free hoodie to companies that feature their success stories on the website.

In this post, we recap the week's most interesting InfluxDB and Telegraf 0.13 related issues, workarounds, how-tos, and Q&A that might have been missed. To recover a lost admin user password, one needs to access the configuration file, disable HTTP authentication, restart the service, connect to the CLI without credentials, reset or create a new admin user, re-enable HTTP authentication, and restart the service again. For non-admin users trying to use a database in the CLI, they must explicitly specify the database name when launching the CLI. The `taginclude` and `tagexclude` arguments are now available in Telegraf 0.13, allowing plugins to exclude tags from emission. Additionally, support options for InfluxDB are available, including free virtual training seminars and paid support subscriptions starting at $399 a month.

InfluxDB Cloud is a fully managed service on AWS, offering scalable and highly available InfluxDB clusters with storage sizes ranging from 16GB to 256GB, starting at $149 per month, including a single Elastic Load Balancer endpoint for writing and querying data. The service automatically handles consensus and coordination behind the scenes, ensuring high availability and scalability. Users can create retention policies with a replication factor of two to ensure data is up and running even if one node goes down. InfluxDB Cloud will offer multi-region clusters and replication later this year, allowing users to scale out their cluster as needed to meet storage or throughput needs.

InfluxDB has been featured in various recent announcements, including free virtual training sessions on mastering the InfluxDB CLI and configuration options, as well as upcoming meetups and training events. Companies such as Facile.it and Develon have successfully implemented InfluxDB for their time-series data management needs, with notable features like continuous queries and aggregation. Mirubee uses InfluxDB to store billions of energy measurements, leveraging its TSM storage engine for efficient data management. Additionally, InfluxDB is being used by organizations such as CurrencyFair and Ducati, further highlighting its versatility in different industries. A call is made to feature companies using InfluxDB in production on influxdata.com, with a "thank you" gift of an InfluxDB hoodie and stickers. Various upcoming webinars and meetups are also listed, including free virtual training sessions and events focused on topics like performance tuning and schema design.

In this post, we recap the week's most interesting InfluxDB and TICK-stack related issues, workarounds, and provide tips on how to return readable timestamps in the CLI by specifying the rfc3339 precision. We also discuss a query limitation where calculating the average of the difference between two fields is not currently supported in one query, but can be achieved by writing the results to a new field and then calculating the average of that new field.

InfluxDB has been busy lately, with several exciting announcements and events coming up. The company is launching its 0.12 version of InfluxDB, Telegraf, and Kapacitor, which includes new features such as kill queries and improved functions. Additionally, InfluxDB Relay is being introduced as an open-source high-availability solution for InfluxDB. The TICK-stack is also gaining traction with companies like Tavisca, LearnZillion, and Giant Swarm using it for real-time analytics and monitoring. Furthermore, InfluxDB is being used in various industries such as travel, education, and IoT to collect and visualize data. To celebrate its growing community, InfluxDB is offering a FREE virtual training on April 14 and other upcoming events. The company is also giving away free InfluxDB hoodies to feature companies that use InfluxDB in production.

The Chronograf Files: The Curious Case of JavaScript's `sort` function` is a story of how a seemingly ordinary day at the InfluxData offices turned into an investigation into a peculiar bug in JavaScript's built-in `sort` function. The issue arose when a user reported that their graphs were being plotted out of order, and it was discovered that the problem lay in the way JavaScript handles timestamps as strings rather than numbers. This led to unexpected behavior when sorting lists of numbers with significant digits, which was only revealed by using a specific dataset spanning two years, 1970-1972. The fix was to provide a `compareFunction` to tell JavaScript how to sort the numbers correctly. The story highlights the importance of understanding one's tools and the potential for critical bugs to manifest themselves under unusual circumstances.

InfluxDB, Telegraf, and Kapacitor 0.12 have been released with several improvements and new features, including query management and limitations in InfluxDB, enhanced data collection capabilities in Telegraf, and significant updates to the TICKscript syntax in Kapacitor. The new version of InfluxDB includes a relay for high availability, allowing users to upgrade while minimizing downtime. Telegraf now supports parsing environment variables, JSON output, and execution of Nagios scripts, among other features. Kapacitor 0.12 brings improvements to its UDF support, including two new operators and a utility for formatting TICKscripts. The updates are part of the long-awaited GA release, which also includes 22 new features and 13 bug fixes. Users can download the latest version and seek assistance with migration from older versions or further training on InfluxDB knowledge.