March 2019 Summaries

Grafana dashboards are powerful open-source analytical and visualization tools that consist of multiple individual panels arranged in a grid, interacting with configured data sources such as InfluxDB, Telegraf, AWS CloudWatch, and others. They enable users to gain insights into time-series data, allowing for efficient and organized data analysis through queries, informative visualizations, and alerts. With Grafana dashboards, users can share their creations with other team members, explore the data together, and customize the dashboards using open-source templates and variables, making it easy to set up a dynamic and interactive dashboard. The integration of Grafana with InfluxDB provides customized visual presentations of key metrics and events with fast rendering, even over large time spans, making it an ideal choice for real-time analytics based on time series data.

InfluxDB 2.0 Alpha 7 has been released, offering enhanced features such as importing and exporting UI-created content, including Dashboards and Tasks, and introducing Variables powered by Flux in the UI for more flexible dashboards and queries. The release also includes an updated Flux library to version 0.23.0. Users can download and explore the latest iteration, providing feedback through the InfluxDB Github Repo or Community Site if needed.

The author of the text, David G. Simmons, has developed a new library in Swift that allows native Apple apps to write data directly to InfluxDB v2.0 with ease. The library is simple to use and can be downloaded from his GitHub page. It supports single data points and bulk writes, and provides features such as setting configuration parameters, precision, tags, and fields for each data point. The author recommends writing data in batches for best performance and has provided examples of how to use the library to write data to InfluxDB v2.0. The library is intended to be a starting point for more advanced features, including querying and creating buckets, which will be added in future updates.

In a developer's journey to support IoT devices with InfluxDB v2.0, the first step is successfully integrating a particulate matter sensor into an ESP8266 board, allowing data to be written to InfluxDB v1.x using an existing library. However, this was only a temporary solution as the library did not support InfluxDB v2.0. A proper fork of the original repository was created and submitted for review, enabling the use of both versions 1.x and 2.x of InfluxDB with the new library. The integration process is straightforward, requiring the addition of specific configuration parameters from the user's InfluxDB account and a simple setup in an Arduino sketch to write data to the v2.0 server.

The author of the article has been working with InfluxDB's 2.0 Alpha releases and was excited about the new features, particularly those related to IoT data processing. The author built a system that streams data from various sensors to InfluxDB and used Flux, a query language for InfluxDB, to perform cross-measurement math calculations. The author used this ability to compensate for temperature and atmospheric pressure effects on CO2 readings from a sensor, which is a game-changer for IoT data processing in InfluxDB.

A new maintenance release for Chronograf is now available, addressing several key issues including strict validation of message templates for Alert Rules, correct quoting of map template variables, and UI improvements in the Data Explorer.

Telegraf, a popular monitoring and logging tool, has released version 1.10.1 with several improvements to its plugins, including fixes for issues related to Consul Input, CSV Parser, Google PubSub Input and Output, Socket Listener Input, System Input, and VMware vSphere Input. The update addresses various problems that could lead to incorrect behavior or errors in the application's performance. The latest release can be downloaded from Telegraf's downloads page.

The InfluxDB blog post series explores Single Exponential Smoothing (SES) and its optimization for time series forecasting. The third part of the series focuses on using InfluxDB's built-in Multiplicative Holt-Winters function to generate predictions on time series data, including a dataset from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The author provides learning resources and explains how to use the FIRST() function to summarize the data with fewer points, effectively preparing it for Holt-Winters forecasting. The post also touches on other optimization methods, such as Nelder-Mead, and discusses the importance of choosing the right metric for evaluation, including RMSE and R-squared.

InfluxDB has released its new version, InfluxDB 2.0 Alpha 6, which includes several enhancements such as the introduction of Templates and a new color picker along with various UI improvements. This release marks an important milestone in the development process, allowing users to provide feedback on functionality, user experience, and APIs. The update is available for download and users are encouraged to explore it and report any issues they find via the InfluxDB Github Repo or Community Site.

Metrics and events are two types of time series data that differ in their distribution across time. Metrics are evenly distributed and can be used for processes like forecasting, while events are unpredictable and occur at irregular intervals. The difference between metrics and events affects how the database stores and compresses the data being ingested, as well as how we interact with it. Understanding the differences between metrics and events is crucial for effective monitoring and analysis of time series data, and InfluxDB emphasizes the ability to track both types of data. By recognizing the unique characteristics of each, developers can make informed decisions about how to collect, store, and analyze their data.

AWS has open sourced Elasticsearch, creating Open Distro for Elasticsearch, with the intention of fork-ing the community, according to Paul Dix. The motivations behind this move are tainted by AWS's clear commercial ambitions, which will favor one vendor over another. This move is similar to Microsoft giving away Internet Explorer in the 90s and claiming it was for user benefit, but was actually a monopolistic strategy. The implications for Elastic and its community, as well as other open source vendors, are significant, including potential fragmentation of the community and uncertainty for developers building their careers on these tools. Ultimately, this move may boost fundraising prospects for commercial players with source available licenses, but also highlights the need for clear distinctions between open and closed-source projects.

InfluxDays New York 2019 is a conference that brings together the best voices in the time series world, with talks covering various topics such as disaster recovery, performance monitoring, and DevSecOps. The event will be live streamed on Wednesday, March 13th, allowing attendees to watch from anywhere in the world. This year's lineup includes speakers from prominent companies like UnitedHealth Group, Oracle, Grafana Labs, Wayfair, Capital One, and InfluxData itself, offering a diverse range of perspectives and expertise.

InfluxDB has released a new version, 2.0 Alpha 5, which includes several enhancements, such as UI improvements and updates to the Flux library. The update also brings breaking changes to data storage, requiring users to upgrade their existing local time series data. Users are advised not to use this release for production or performance testing, but rather to provide feedback on its functionality and user experience. The latest release can be downloaded from the InfluxDB website.

InfluxDB's Holt-Winters method is a powerful predictive maintenance technique that determines forecasted values by calculating an exponentially weighted average, incorporating trend and seasonality into the forecasted value. The multiplicative method uses three smoothing parameters (beta-star, gamma, and alpha) to optimize the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), which is scale-dependent and normalized, and is optimized using the Nelder-Mead numerical method. This optimization process allows for finding good approximations of the smoothing parameters and initial values, enabling the use of Holt-Winters in forecasting time series data.

The TICK Stack, a monitoring and analytics platform, has been integrated into DigitalOcean's Marketplace, allowing users to easily set up a one-click installation of the platform on their DigitalOcean droplets. The process involves creating a new droplet, configuring Chronograf, which is the user-facing interface of the TICK Stack, and securing it with OAuth 2.0 authentication and TLS encryption. Users can then explore metrics collected by Telegraf, another component of the TICK Stack, and create additional users to manage their setup.

Telegraf 1.10.0 has been released with several new features, including support for Google PubSub and Amazon Kinesis as input plugins, allowing users to ingest data from these services directly into Telegraf. Additionally, a new plugin is available to collect Kubernetes resource state metrics, enabling the collection of state data about daemonsets, deployments, nodes, and other resources in a single instance deployed to a Kubernetes cluster. Other notable additions include support for Google Cloud PubSub push, Kinesis consumer, Neptune Apex, Nginx upstream check, multi-file, Google Stackdriver, and new serializers such as ServiceNow Metrics and Carbon2. The binaries are available on the Telegraf downloads page.

InfluxData's InfluxDB is now available on DigitalOcean Marketplace, a platform that connects developers with pre-configured software and infrastructure stacks for easy app development, deployment, and scaling. This partnership aims to simplify the process of deploying and scaling time series databases, making it easier for developers to access cutting-edge technologies like InfluxDB. With this listing, DigitalOcean's 3.5 million developer community can now start monitoring Kubernetes infrastructures in just a few minutes. The move is part of InfluxData's commitment to open source and the developer community, with the goal of improving access and availability to innovative technologies like InfluxDB.

InfluxDays NYC 2019, a comprehensive technical conference on time series data, will be held in New York on March 13-14. The event features keynotes and discussions with IT leaders from prominent organizations such as Oracle, Wayfair, Optum, Capital One, Google, and Grafana, offering analysis of InfluxDB use cases and real-world examples. The conference also includes technical workshops, updates on InfluxDB 2.0, and presentations by industry experts, including speakers from notable companies like Oracle, Capital One, Google, and Wayfair. Attendees will have the opportunity to gain knowledge, network with developers, explore related technologies, and learn about the latest developments in time series data and InfluxData products. The lineup includes talks and workshops from InfluxData employees and community members, covering topics such as DevOps infrastructure, application monitoring, real-time analytics, IoT applications, and more.

Maintenance releases have been made available for InfluxDB Enterprise and OSS, providing associated fixes to support community members who do not wish to upgrade to a current version at this time. The latest versions of InfluxDB are 1.7, with the most recent maintenance release being 1.6.6 for both OSS and Enterprise. Community members can download the 1.6.6 OSS release, while Enterprise customers need to contact support for assistance with accessing this specific release.