March 2020 Summaries

Sensor data from road traffic can provide valuable insights for public safety and emergency response times by enabling city operators to predict and manage traffic flow at critical times. IoT-enabled smart city technology is transforming the way emergency services respond, with the ability to access information from various databases and share it with other responders becoming a game-changer. OneMind, an end-to-end integrated IoT real-time platform featuring real-time visibility of existing systems, enables better insights and improved decision-making for city operators. The use of InfluxDB as a time series database allows Worldsensing to ingest and store a city's critical time series data from multiple sources, providing real-time mobility management system and enabling directors of operations to make decisions based on real-time data and actionable insights.

InfluxDB 2.0 Beta 7 is now available, featuring enhancements such as improved dashboards in light mode for presentations and kiosks, enhanced shell completions and JSON output for the Influx CLI tool, and better autocompletion when writing Flux code in the browser and VSCode plugin. This release is not intended for production usage but rather for testing and feedback purposes, with users encouraged to join the InfluxDB Community Slack and provide input on the functionality and user experience of the new features.

As remote working becomes increasingly common due to COVID-19, it's essential for individuals to adopt effective communication strategies in platforms like Slack to maintain productivity and collaboration. To achieve this, users should be empathetic with colleagues' messages, using emojis to convey tone and context, and liberal muting of channels to minimize distractions. Liberal tagging is also crucial to ensure notifications are received by the relevant team members. Additionally, setting up notifications to silence outside working hours and limiting Slack notifications can help maintain focus. Asynchronous workflows should be prioritized over synchronous ones, with messages providing enough context to facilitate collaboration without disrupting colleagues' work. Furthermore, avoiding shouting or using @everyone tags, and being accountable and dependable in responding to questions and requests, are key to successful remote communication.

Telegraf 1.14.0 is a new feature-bearing release that includes several key features and improvements, such as the sqlserver_azure_db_resource_stats measurement, a change in timezone usage for the date processor, and new input plugins for Clickhouse, Azure Event & IoT Consumer, Infiniband, Arista LANZ, Modbus, Monit, SFlow, Wireguard, Warp10 output plugin. Additionally, there are new processors, including Deduplication Processor, Template Processor, and S2 Geo Processor. The release also includes security enhancements and extensibility improvements. The binaries for the latest open source release can be found on the downloads page.

As a Community Manager at InfluxData, Michael Ellis is excited to be part of an open-source company that genuinely cares about its users and values its core principles. With a background in marketing and internet sourcing, as well as experience working on various teams within the tech industry, particularly with Mozilla's developer evangelism team, Michael brings his passion for community-building and empowering volunteers to enhance the InfluxData community. He aims to promote and support the great work of the InfluxAces, foster a stronger sense of community through engaging activities, and grow the global meetup presence by expanding time series meetups and increasing event frequency.

Pi Day is celebrated annually on March 14th to commemorate the mathematical constant Pi (π), which has been widely studied for over 4,000 years. The first known celebration was in 1988 at San Francisco's Exploratorium and has since become a global phenomenon, with mathematicians using Pi in various fields such as geometry, physics, astronomy, architecture, construction, and mathematics. Piphilology is the practice of memorizing digits of Pi using mnemonic techniques, with notable examples including Rajveer Meena's 70,000 decimal places recited blindfolded. The celebration also includes fun facts about Pi and its connection to Albert Einstein's birthday, as well as various types of pies that people enjoy on this day. InfluxData, a remote-friendly organization, asked their distributed team what their favorite type of pie is, with pecan pie being the most popular choice.

InfluxDB users who need to process and analyze large amounts of time series data can now use Apache Zeppelin, a web-based notebook that supports Apache Spark. Zeppelin enables quick language switching, built-in visualizations, and dynamic forms, making it an ideal platform for collaborative data science and analytics. By combining InfluxDB with Zeppelin and Spark, users can query their data using the Java Client, parallelize the results to distributed datasets, register the dataframe as a temporary view, and query and visualize the data in SparkSQL. This integration allows users to leverage the power of InfluxDB's time series data lake while still working in their preferred language with familiar libraries. The tutorial demonstrates how to achieve this using Flux queries, Java Client, and Spark, providing a solution for big data time series scenarios that can help users save time and improve productivity.

InfluxDB 2.0 Beta 6 has been released, offering several enhancements including an updated Clockface interface, support for multiple profiles in the Influx CLI tool, new Geo library functions in Flux, and updates to the Flux library. This beta release is not intended for production usage but rather for testing and feedback purposes, with users encouraged to join the InfluxDB Community Slack to provide input on its functionality and user experience.

InfluxData has implemented a business continuity plan to ensure the health and wellbeing of its employees and minimize potential service disruptions to customers in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, with remote-first operations allowing for natural resilience and processes to continue delivering on all aspects of the business. The company's majority-remote workforce is working from home to promote employee safety and has implemented close communication with staff, customers, and cloud service providers to monitor the situation and evaluate policies as it evolves. With globally distributed regions and multiple facilities, InfluxData does not anticipate any impact on its ability to continue rendering services to customers.

The InfluxData community has been actively engaged in various initiatives, including the launch of community templates for InfluxDB, a Slack workspace with over 1,400 members, and an increasing number of issues opened by community members, totaling 350 issues and 380 commits so far in 2020. The company is also working on improving Flux, its powerful query and scripting language, and Telegraf, its largest community project with over 250 plugins. InfluxData encourages community feedback and participation, with a focus on communication and collaboration.