July 2017 Summaries

InfluxDB was successfully installed and running on an ARTIK-520 REDUX in just 5 minutes, with the user even creating their first dashboard in under two minutes. The installation required multiple components, including InfluxDB, Telegraf, Chronograf, and Kapacitor, which were downloaded and set up quickly. However, when the system rebooted, the processes didn't automatically start again, causing issues, but they could be easily fixed by following a tutorial or similar solution.

InfluxData has announced the general availability of its modern, open-source platform for metrics and events, version 1.3, which can now handle a billion unique time series, making it easier to manage ephemeral data in applications built with containers, microservices, and sensors. The platform provides a comprehensive set of tools and services for accumulating, analyzing, and acting on data through powerful visualizations and notifications. New features include Time Series Indexing, Highly Availability Anomaly Detection, Query Language Improvements, and Automatic Cluster Rebalancing, which enhance developer productivity and operational scaling and availability. With this release, InfluxData delivers on its promise of providing a modern engine for metrics and events with rapid time to value and extreme scale.

InfluxData, a company founded by Paul Dix, built a purpose-built Time Series Platform to address the unique challenges of handling time series data. Regular and irregular time series are handled, with metadata describing the series that users may query on later. Time series data requires fast ingestion, high-precision data for short periods, continuous aggregation and downsampling, and efficient querying patterns. Traditional relational databases like SQL and distributed databases like Cassandra or HBase are not designed to solve these specific issues, requiring significant application-level code. InfluxData's platform optimizes for developer happiness by reducing the need for custom code, leveraging peculiarities of time series data, and providing a common API for building solutions. The platform aims to provide better performance and reduced developer effort compared to more generalized databases.

The text discusses the upcoming changes to InfluxDB's data model and query language, which will introduce a new functional query language that is compatible with both InfluxDB and Kapacitor. The current query language, known as InfluxQL, has largely remained unchanged since its introduction in 2013 and resembles SQL. However, the new functional query language, inspired by JavaScript-style function chaining syntax, aims to provide more power and flexibility for users working with time series data. The changes will be additive to future releases of InfluxDB and Kapacitor and will include a CLI with autocomplete functionality and a user-friendly UI for building queries. The goal is to make the platform easier to use while maintaining its analytical capabilities.

The InfluxData TICK Stack is a complete IoT data platform that can perform various functions such as collecting, aggregating, storing, analyzing, and visualizing data from sensors, acting as a central location for IoT installations. A gateway device is used to collect all the data from sensors in one place before shipping it to the cloud. The InfluxDB Cloud instance acts as a central database for metrics, events, and real-time analytics. The TICK Stack can be easily configured using configuration files, and Telegraf is a plugin-driven agent-based data collection tool that provides an easy interface for building custom plugins. Kapacitor is a stream processing tool used to process, monitor, and alert on time series data. An IoT Gateway device can enable localized data analysis, which is particularly useful for local plant managers who want to analyze data without relying on cloud-based systems. The InfluxData TICK Stack can be built using various devices such as Raspberry Pi, and developers can use the balena.io dashboard to deploy code and complete configuration.

In the past week, InfluxData attended the CloudFoundry summit where they met users excited about Chronograf's new version. At the event, they discussed their collaboration with CloudFoundry and InfluxDB, highlighting the need for a Firehose Nozzle to read off the Loggregator system's metrics stream. Prior to the conference, an existing implementation of the Firehose was updated to work with the latest CloudFoundry and InfluxDB versions, and a webinar on deploying this nozzle was offered. Additionally, users shared their own experiences and implementations of Firehose nozzles in production, showcasing the versatility of Chronograf in various environments.