January 2020 Summaries

With the growth of solutions tailored for different use cases and business demands, enterprise buyers are entrusting developers to make decisions traditionally left to CIOs and CTOs, leading to a trend towards open source software and non-relational databases in 2020.

InfluxData, a company building a flagship product InfluxDB Cloud, conducts user research to create a smooth signup flow for new users. The company takes a hybrid approach to user research, combining quantitative data with qualitative in-depth interviews to inform design changes. By involving community members in the redesign process, InfluxData aims to make its core time series platform more useful and powerful. Participants in user research sessions will see new design and functionality before anyone else, have a chance to influence the direction of the future product, and receive incentives such as socks or an Amazon Gift Card. The goal is to understand users' challenges and create a better product through collaboration with the community.

InfluxDB is a time series database that has helped Matthew VanTassel, CTO at Rise, make his house smarter by monitoring metrics such as CPU, memory, disk, and network usage to quickly pinpoint performance issues. He also uses it to monitor his IoT devices, servers, and Docker containers, logging data from smart home devices like SmartThings and Nest, and even tracking gardening metrics with Raspberry Pi and GardenBot. By pushing data into InfluxDB, he can create visualizations and alerts for things like battery levels, temperature, and motion detection. With its ease of implementation and comprehensive documentation, Matthew was able to quickly get started with InfluxDB and unlock its full potential. He now plans to expand his use of InfluxDB at Rise to improve their product and customer experience.

InfluxDB 2.0 Beta 2 has been released, bringing enhancements such as compatibility with Kubernetes Custom Resource Definitions, Jsonnet support for resource description, and improved performance in querying data through the browser by fixing an issue where intervals were not being calculated correctly. The release also includes updated documentation for the Ruby Client Library, a Flux library update to version 0.59.5, and is available for download. Users are encouraged to join the InfluxDB Community Slack to provide feedback on the functionality, user experience, and APIs.

Two new maintenance releases for Kapacitor and Kapacitor Enterprise are available now. The updates include support for custom Certificate Authority (CA) certificates when connecting to InfluxDB Enterprise meta node, a change in package names to make them distinct from the OSS package names, and fixes for issues with timestamps being set incorrectly and user-defined functions written in Python 3.0. Additionally, Kapacitor Enterprise now includes templates that can be used with MQTT topic specifications, while Kapacitor itself has been upgraded with support for these templates as well. The binaries are available on the InfluxDB downloads page or through the InfluxDB Enterprise portal for customers.

Prophet is an open-source software for forecasting time series data, developed by Facebook's Core Data Science team. It uses an additive model with non-linear trends, seasonality, and holiday effects to produce accurate and fast forecasts. Prophet is robust to missing data and shifts in the trend, and typically handles outliers well. The tutorial demonstrates how to integrate Prophet with InfluxDB, a time series database, to make univariate time series predictions. The process involves querying InfluxDB, converting the results into a DataFrame, fitting the model using Prophet, making future forecasts, and writing the forecast to InfluxDB. The tutorial aims to demonstrate the integration of Prophet and InfluxDB and familiarize users with Prophet.

InfluxData's time series database, InfluxDB, is evolving with new features and releases in 2020. The company plans to release InfluxDB 2.0 as open source, while also releasing Flux, a query language for managing data, at version 1.0. Additionally, an innovative user packaging system will be introduced, aiming to make the database more accessible to users. With these updates, InfluxData aims to further establish itself in the market and improve its offerings for developers and organizations using time series databases.

A new maintenance release for Telegraf is available now, including improvements to various plugins such as Processes Input, X.509 Cert Input, vSphere Input, SNMP Input, S.M.A.R.T. Input, Kafka Output, and JSON Parser, with fixes for issues on Windows, in the x509_cert input plugin, vSphere input plugin custom attributes, SNMP input URL agent address form, S.M.A.R.T. input logic, Kafka messages timestamps, and the json_strict option. The binaries for the latest open-source release can be found on the InfluxData downloads page.

InfluxDB is a time series database that offers a Python client library called Pandas, allowing users to interact with the database through Python. The InfluxDB Python Client Library supports Pandas DataFrames, making it easy for data scientists to use InfluxDB. This tutorial explains how to query an InfluxDB instance and return the data as a DataFrame, as well as explore data science resources included in the Client repo. It also provides examples of writing Flux queries and converting them into DataFrames, and offers tips on using Pandas to complement Flux with InfluxDB. The library is designed to help users execute time series analysis faster, especially for smaller datasets.

InfluxData, a company specializing in time series databases, has recently been interviewed by JAXenter about its platform, Flux, and its "time to awesome" philosophy. The interview with Tim Hall, Head of Products, discussed InfluxData's plans for 2020, including becoming multicloud and expanding its reach to Google Cloud Platform and Azure. Additionally, the company is using Flux as a new data scripting and querying language, aiming to improve performance and user experience.

InfluxDays London 2020 aims to provide a platform for gaining technical knowhow and knowledge sharing from InfluxDB community members, with a focus on incorporating inspirational experiences and insights from subject matter experts. The event seeks submissions from individuals who can share their expertise on various topics related to InfluxDB, including best practices, methodologies, success stories, and solutions to common problems. InfluxData aims to make the event accessible and useful to people of all backgrounds and experiences, with a goal of highlighting diverse voices and viewpoints.

SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) is an application-layer protocol used for managing and monitoring network devices. It provides a common way for devices on a network to share monitoring metrics, allowing users to collect relevant information about the devices on their network to detect and address failures in devices and connections. To monitor SNMP devices with Telegraf, a new SNMP Trap Input Plugin was released in Telegraf 1.13, which receives SNMP notifications (traps and inform requests) to provide real-time views of system and network performance issues. The plugin can be configured using the `[[inputs.snmp_trap]]` input, and it collects metrics such as trap source IP address, OID values, and MIB information. It also provides a way to balance resource consumption impact by pulling SNMP data in short intervals.

InfluxData's 2019 Year in Review highlights the company's significant achievements, including surpassing 700 paying customers, launching operations in Europe, transitioning to a cloud-first company with the release of InfluxDB Cloud 2.0, and expanding its enterprise customer base, which includes notable clients such as Visa, Airbus Helicopters, and NASA. The company also saw explosive community growth, with over 60% increase in daily active instances, and introduced initiatives like the InfluxAces program to recognize and support leaders in the InfluxDB community. With a $60 million Series D funding secured, InfluxData expanded its workforce by nearly 60%, opened offices in Austin and London, and was named one of Fast Company's 50 Best Workplaces for Innovators. The company is now focusing on making time series technology more accessible to developers across various use cases.

PayPal sought a scalable host monitoring solution to keep pace with its dynamic infrastructure as it modernized from old applications to containers. They required a single-vendor platform that could provide metrics collection, storage, alerting, and visualization all at once. Central to this new solution was the need for a time series database due to its ability to make educated data-driven decisions quickly. InfluxDB Enterprise was chosen as it provided an end-to-end solution from one vendor, including Telegraf aggregators, message queues, and publishers, which helped control data payload size, manage message flow, and avoid single points of failure. The solution used InfluxDB Enterprise, Telegraf agents, message queues, and publishers to build a resilient monitoring system that works at scale, with a replication factor of 3 and more data nodes to prevent immediate single point of failure conditions.

A new maintenance release for Chronograf version 1.7.17 is now available, which includes a fix for an issue where users could not log out when authenticated using OAuth. The latest releases can be downloaded from the official website for community members. This release aims to improve security and stability for the platform.

Telegraf 1.13.1 is a new maintenance release that includes improvements to various plugins such as SNMP Traps Input, MQTT Consumer Input, SQL Server Input, DiskIO Input, RabbitMQ Input, and Cisco GNMI Telemetry Input, addressing issues related to connection loss, cache invalidation, and encoding query hash fields. The binaries for the latest open-source release can be found on InfluxData's downloads page.

A new release of InfluxDB 2.0 Beta is available now, with enhancements including support for defining Checks, Notification Rules, and Tasks in manifest files, improved user interface features such as displaying last run status for tasks and checks, and a streamlined command line interface. This beta release is not intended for production usage and is meant to gather feedback from the community through the InfluxDB Community Slack. The release includes known bugs that will be addressed in the next version, and users are encouraged to download and explore the latest release while providing feedback or reporting issues through various channels.

InfluxDB 2.0 Open Source Beta has been officially released, marking a significant milestone towards general availability. The new version offers improved reliability, fewer breaking changes, and enhanced features such as Configuration as Code using Manifests, Flux's increased performance and capabilities, and Convert InfluxQL Queries to Flux using the Transpiler. Users can expect a more stable experience in production environments, but may still encounter issues that require triage and fixing. The community is encouraged to join the Slack Channel to provide feedback and help build the world's best time series platform.

The author explains a high-level approach to monitoring website response times using Serverless Flux and InfluxDB, a time series database as a service. The process involves creating a Flux script that measures performance, saves data to InfluxDB, and runs the script every 5 minutes, collecting and visualizing the response time metric to provide insights into a website's performance.

The financial services industry is heavily reliant on technology to inform better investment decisions, with big data technologies and analytics playing a crucial role in this process. The increasing volume of market data poses a major challenge for financial institutions, requiring real-time capital market data visualization and dashboarding capabilities to differentiate themselves from the competition. InfluxDB Cloud has been utilized by CJC to build mosaicOA, a monitoring tool that provides real-time visibility into IT system health and enables firms to visualize and analyze large volumes of data in one place, driving time and cost savings. The use of InfluxDB Cloud has proven vital to CJC's business, enabling real-time market data visibility for the global financial services sector.

Flux is a powerful open-source language for working with data that has matured in recent months, making it an ideal time to try it out. Microsoft's Visual Studio Code editor now supports Flux as an extension, providing features like error messaging, syntax highlighting, and querying directly from the code editor. The extension leverages the same parser used in InfluxDB, allowing for a seamless integration with existing workflows. With regular updates planned, Flux support will expand to include intelligent autocompletion, integrated script execution, and other features.