May 2017 Summaries

The use case described is that of a living green wall, a vertical garden system used in various locations such as offices, buildings, and corridors to purify and humidify the air while promoting a healthier environment. The system requires regular maintenance, including watering, pruning, and monitoring, which can be challenging due to varying installation sizes, plant types, and climate conditions. To address these challenges, Spiio developed an IoT platform that collects data from sensors placed on the plants, analyzes it, and provides recommendations for optimal irrigation and maintenance through a mobile app. The platform uses InfluxData's Telegraf agents to collect and analyze data, which is then used to predict and schedule future irrigations, reducing the risk of overwatering and minimizing maintenance costs.

I recently turned 40 years old, which made me reflect on my career and consider a new move. I found myself in the unique position of hitting this life milestone and exploring a new career path. This process involved introspection, examining what I believe in and like to do, followed by exploration, learning about opportunities to adjust or attune my life accordingly. That led me to Paul, Evan, and the team at InfluxData, who have built a product that embodies what I believe in, and they hired a team that is both empowered and equipped to build a great company around it. The goal of InfluxDB's developer-focused approach is to observe customer patterns, then enhance their product to make customers' lives easier. The team at InfluxData personifies this focus on organic community engagement and relentless customer focus. I was impressed by the team's passion for building a product that developers by developers, and I'm excited to learn from them as we embark on this new journey together. As I take on this new role, I'll be applying my business development skills in a foundational BD approach, experimenting with new strategies while learning about time series data software. This perfect balance of experience and new technology excites me, and I'm eager to contribute to the company's growth and success.

InfluxDB has introduced changes in its syntax, specifically regarding field keys and tag keys, where the `::` syntax can be used to specify if an identifier is a field or tag, allowing users to query both fields and tags with unique names. Additionally, InfluxDB version 1.2.4 has changed the behavior of writes with `time` as a field key or tag key, rejecting such writes and returning errors. Chronograf now supports existing Kapacitor tasks, but with limited functionality in its user interface, requiring manual editing of TICKscripts outside of the interface.

In the journey of choosing a real-time metrics data store, Botmetric started with OpenTSDB but found it to be a headache due to its operational complexity and lack of reliable failover. They then tried Cassandra and KairosDB, which offered quick setup and less operational burden but had their own set of challenges such as batch loading issues and scalability problems. Finally, they migrated to InfluxDB, which proved to be a game-changer with its simplicity, ease of use, support for various client libraries, and great aggregation capability. InfluxDB's TICK stack deployment also simplified development and production operations, reducing overhead for engineering teams. With InfluxDB, Botmetric is now able to collect and process large amounts of time series data in real-time, enabling them to deliver intelligent cloud management solutions to their customers.

The Open Source Business Model is Under Siege is about the challenges faced by companies building businesses around open source software infrastructure, particularly from cloud vendors like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. The author argues that open source isn't a business model but rather a way of developing and delivering software, and that it's a superior method except for making money. The question is where the subsidy will come from, and common methods include consulting & professional services, support & training, production tooling & monitoring, open core, and Software as a Service (SaaS). However, each of these has its problems. The author shares their own experience with InfluxDB and other projects, including struggling with supporting and producing tooling, and eventually adopting the open core model to make money while continuing to invest in open source software. They believe that SaaS is where the future of open source lies, but successful models resemble open core, using closed source software for managed platforms as a moat against competitors. The cloud vendors aim to make infrastructure software easy, targeting verticals and using open source as building blocks, forcing companies to find new methods for making money.

InfluxDB Tech Tips: Configuring Telegraf & Kapacitor When auth is Enabled on InfluxDB & Tips on Chronograf` InfluxDB users can now configure their Telegraf and Kapacitor instances to connect to an authenticated InfluxDB instance. To do this, they need to specify their InfluxDB username and password in the Telegraf and Kapacitor configuration files. The status icon on Chronograf's Host List page indicates whether Chronograf has received data from a host's Telegraf instance within the past minute. Currently, Chronograf supports five visualization types: line, stacked, step-plot, singleStat, and line+stat. Users can deploy InfluxDB on their servers or in the cloud for free trials, and share their success stories to receive rewards.

The Value of Modern Time Series in the Age of Instrumentation` In the "Age of Instrumentation", cheap sensors, networks, gateways, and cloud-native backends are making it easier to measure change over time, leading to a steady stream of data that can be used with machine learning and AI to act with intent and purpose on the physical world. Time Series Databases (TSDBs) are emerging as a fast-growing category in DBMS platforms, designed for collecting, storing, querying, downsampling, visualizing, and acting upon time-stamped metrics and events from the instrumented world. InfluxData believes that TSDBs will be the foundation of the "Age of Instrumentation", enabling customers to collect, analyze, process, control systems, and predict future behavior in real-time, not just in the physical but also in the virtual world, where software instrumentation is growing rapidly.

InfluxData has simplified IoT and DevOps monitoring with enhanced visualization features by introducing a common administrative UI across its Enterprise and Open Source Platforms. This allows developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics, and IoT applications faster and easier, empowering them to identify patterns, control complex systems, and turn insight into action.

In 2017, InfluxData introduced enhanced visualization features to simplify IoT and DevOps monitoring by providing a common administrative UI across both the Enterprise and open source platforms of InfluxDB. This move aims to accelerate the development of next-generation monitoring, analytics, and IoT applications by making it easier for developers to build and manage these systems.

In a groundbreaking initiative, BBOXX has successfully implemented IoT Sensor Monitoring using InfluxDB, providing affordable clean energy to off-grid communities in Africa, revolutionizing the lives of hundreds of thousands of children by offering a smoke-free environment for studying and socializing. The company overcame significant technological challenges, including high costs, battery inefficiency, and limited connectivity, to create an elegant solution that leverages real-time data analysis and predictive analytics to optimize energy usage and prevent battery failures. By harnessing the power of InfluxDB, BBOXX has become a data-driven business, unlocking valuable insights into customer behavior, energy consumption patterns, and socio-economic impact, resulting in impressive business and socio-economic outcomes, including reduced carbon footprint, savings, and improved access to education for thousands of children.

In Chronograf, template variables allow users to create dashboards with dynamic queries without having to create multiple graphs, while query building has been improved with the merging of raw query editor and builder features. However, assigning non-admin user permissions such as READ or WRITE access is not currently supported in Chronograf, but can be achieved through manual curl commands to grant specific database permissions.

The introduction of pull support in InfluxDB's Kapacitor 1.3 beta release allows for a standardized way of exposing targets for metrics data collection, reducing the effort required to write collectors and making it easier for services and applications of all kinds to expose their metrics data. This is achieved through service discovery and scraping, similar to Prometheus, which enables outside systems to collect telemetry data from applications without them sending data to a new service. The pull method has its advantages, such as allowing any outside system to collect telemetry data, but also has limitations, including the need for periodic polling of targets. Kapacitor's integration with Prometheus' service discovery and scraping code provides a standardized way to expose targets and collect metrics data, making it easier to implement pull monitoring and collection in InfluxDB.