June 2019 Summaries

A new maintenance release of InfluxDB 1.7.7 has been made available, addressing several issues including sorting aggregates by tag and time, using timezone for subqueries, fixing a CSV decoder bug, resolving an open/close race in SeriesFile, syncing series segments after truncate, and improving the ordering of selectors within subqueries with different outer tags.

InfluxDB 2.0 Alpha 14 has been released, offering improvements such as more responsive web UIs, a new influxd tool for inspecting the write-ahead log, and enhanced dropdown behavior. The Flux library has also been updated to version 0.34.2, featuring extensive string manipulation functions and regular expressions. This release is not intended for production usage but rather provides an opportunity for feedback on functionality and user experience.

Telegraf 1.11.1 has been released, addressing various plugin-related issues and improving its functionality. The new release includes fixes for several plugins, including Disk Input, Cisco GNMI Input, Procstat Input, NGINX Plus API Input, PgBouncer Input, Docker Input, System Input, SMART Input, and Statsd Input. These improvements aim to resolve specific problems and enhance the overall performance of Telegraf. The binaries for the latest open source release can be found on the official downloads page.

The Developer On Fire podcast features Paul Dix, CTO of InfluxData, in a discussion that covers various topics including open source and time series data. Paul shares his experience with software testing, the story behind InfluxDB, its use cases, and his insights on team-building. He also provides three tips for delivering more value to customers, which he believes are essential for finding a market and running a successful business.

Timbergrove, an American-based creative technology studio and consulting firm, has developed a smart workplace kit using InfluxDB to help building managers get started with IoT. They used Digi SmartSense devices for humidity and temperature monitoring, CT sensors for power monitoring, and Pi Zero-Ws with camera modules for occupancy monitoring. The data is streamed to InfluxDB from a queue and IBM Event Streams, and visualized in Grafana dashboards that provide immediate value to end users while being modular and extensible. Timbergrove has also built custom plugins for Grafana, including one for geofencing with Mapbox, and plans to integrate their smart valve and flow meter installation with Grafana in the future. The goal is to deliver easy onboarding while providing extensibility, and to make building managers' lives easier by making IoT data accessible and actionable.

A new maintenance release of Chronograf 1.7.12 is now available, addressing several issues including allowing negative numbers for configured y-axis minimums and properly updating query time bounds when zooming in on a dashboard. The release also includes fixes for hanging pages, support for web workers in Internet Explorer 11 and Edge, and improved behavior with PagerDuty v1 deprecation messages. Additionally, the Flux Technical Preview has been updated to fix an issue with parsing responses correctly.

This maintenance release for Kapacitor includes security enhancements such as skipping SSL verification with an alert post node, additional TLS configuration options, and improved transport consistency. The update also addresses a deadlock issue in the barrier node when delete is used and fixes issues related to group stats and file ownership. For Kapacitor Enterprise customers, this release introduces breaking changes including topic handler updates that require all topic owners to be available and support for insecure TLS and authentication when connecting to InfluxDB Enterprise meta nodes.

Apache NiFi has been a game changer in the world of IoT, allowing developers to automate data transformation and flow from IoT sensors and edge devices to anywhere they want. By combining NiFi with InfluxDB, industries can easily make their IoT data streams securely accessible and usable, providing a single view of data across all facilities for proactive maintenance, failure detection, and other business-based outcomes. The combination enables the enterprise to have access to real-time plant-floor information in a consistent manner, overcoming common challenges such as connecting facility or enterprise historians with modern toolsets and analytics pipelines while guaranteeing continuous data flow between them. With this solution, industries can leverage OPC-based data from factory automation and process manufacturing, providing a powerful solution in a matter of minutes to securely collect, observe, and act on facility data.

InfluxDB 2.0 Alpha 13 has been released, offering enhancements such as the ability to select non-time values for X and Y axes, shading below lines in line graphs, and improved binary line graph display. Additionally, various UI bug fixes and performance improvements have been made, along with updates to the Flux library. The release is not intended for production or performance testing but rather for providing feedback on functionality, user experience, and APIs. Users are encouraged to download the latest iteration, report any issues, and engage with the community to provide input.

Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData, shares his insights on creating an amazing culture and building a remote-first organization in this podcast episode. He reveals the key to hiring the best talent and discusses how he has scaled his company from 130 employees to handle massive amounts of data created by the Internet of Things (IoT). The conversation provides valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and leaders looking to build successful companies in Silicon Valley or beyond.

Telegraf 1.11.0 brings a new set of features, including plugins for collecting Cisco GNMI Telemetry and Cisco Model-Driven Telemetry data, as well as an HTTP health check output plugin that allows load balancers to detect overloaded instances. A new ECS Input Plugin uses the ECS v2 metadata and stats API endpoints to gather container statistics. The Cloudwatch Input has been updated to use a more efficient API with required GetMetricData permissions instead of GetMetricStatistics. New inputs include BIND 9 Nameserver Statistics, GitHub repository information, OpenWeatherMap weather data, and PowerDNS Recursor metrics. The Health output plugin provides an HTTP health check resource that can return a failure status code based on metric values, while the Syslog output plugin sends formatted syslog messages over UDP or TCP or TLS. New aggregators include the Final aggregator, which emits the last metric of a contiguous series, and new serializers like Wavefront, which translates Telegraf metrics to Wavefront Data Format.

Thom Crowe, a new Community Manager at InfluxData, shares his journey of joining the company. Thom started in digital marketing in 2014 and worked for Compose (formerly MongoHQ), a DBaaS platform. He was introduced to InfluxData by friends who spoke positively about it, and he was drawn to the company's values, which were evident through employee testimonials like Sonia Gupta's "Why I Joined InfluxData" article. Thom reached out to Chris Churilo, Director of Product Marketing, and after a serendipitous conversation, landed the Community Manager position. Since joining, Thom has been impressed by the company's emphasis on innovation, teamwork, and supporting the community, which aligns with his own enthusiasm and commitment.

InfluxDB Community Office Hours` is a new virtual program launched by InfluxData to engage with its community, where experts will be available to answer questions about time series and InfluxDB through monthly live panels with Q&A. The first session will take place on June 12th at 4:00 pm London time, featuring software engineers Michael Desa and Jacob Marble, developer relations manager David McKay, and Plushcap, the community manager. The sessions are being recorded, allowing attendees to catch up later if they miss it, but questions asked during the session will not be available for those who join later. InfluxDB Community Office Hours aims to create a collaborative environment where users can share their thoughts and engage with experts in real-time.

InfluxDays London is a European tech conference focused on time series data, with an amazing lineup of speakers and workshops. The event will be livestreamed for attendees who cannot attend in person, with a schedule that includes talks from prominent industry figures such as InfluxData CEO Evan Kaplan and Prometheus co-founder Julian Volz. The livestream will also feature a Slack channel where attendees can interact with each other and the speakers in real-time. Registration is now open for the livestream, which kicks off on Thursday, June 13th at 9:30 am London time.

Telegraf is an open-source monitoring agent developed by InfluxData, a company committed to open source principles. The company's database, InfluxDB, also contributes 90% of its codebase to the open source community. Telegraf supports integration with over 200 software components and plugins, but its binary size can be significant, weighing in at 60MiB for the amd64 binary and 244MiB for the Docker Image, which may become problematic when utilizing multiple instances in a Kubernetes environment.

I'm Plushcap, here to help with your query. The article discusses how InfluxDB can be used as a learning tool to develop a trading strategy using Python. The author was inspired by the idea of creating an automated Bitcoin trading bot and stumbled upon Alpaca, a commission-free REST API stock brokerage. However, they found that Alpaca's example algorithms were too basic and needed more financial analysis tools and technical analysis functions like InfluxDB's Chande Momentum Oscillator (CMO). The author used InfluxQL to apply the CMO to their data from Apple's stock prices and visualized it using Chronograf. They explained how to interpret the CMO, including when it goes over +50 indicating overbought conditions or below -50 indicating oversold conditions, and how to use a moving average (MA) as another confirmation indicator. The author concluded that InfluxDB has potential for technical analysis and was excited to explore more functions in the future.