May 2020 Summaries

Flux is a data scripting and query language developed by the creators of InfluxDB, ideal for ETL, monitoring, and alerting, offering a CLI and web-based UI for point-and-click scripting, combining the power of InfluxQL and TICKscripts into a unified syntax. The upcoming Flux Training on June 8-9, 2020, will provide hands-on experience with InfluxDB and Flux, covering basic concepts, advanced topics like User Defined Functions, and time series analysis and stream processing fundamentals, taught by InfluxDB and Flux experts who are professors of data science and have extensive teaching experience. The training is discounted for the virtual format and includes a great student-to-teacher ratio, virtual office hours, and constant contact with instructors through Zoom and Slack.

This article describes how to track COVID-19 data in South America using Telegraf, InfluxDB, and Chronograf. The author, a DevOps Engineer from Uruguay, created a dashboard to visualize the number of cases and deaths in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. He used an API from Johns Hopkins University to fetch real-time data and stored it in InfluxDB. Telegraf was then used to convert the data into a format that could be consumed by InfluxDB. The author created queries using Flux, a scripting language built into InfluxDB, to visualize various metrics such as the number of confirmed cases and the change in new cases over time. The dashboard is available for download with configuration files.

Giraffe is an open source React-based visualization library used in InfluxDB v2 UI, employing clever algorithms to handle high volume data, with a tutorial demonstrating its use with the JavaScript Client to build a line graph in the browser. The tutorial assumes familiarity with the JavaScript Client and knowledge of querying InfluxDB, and provides a simple static site to visualize RAM usage from a local machine. The library's valueAxisLabel parameter is used to specify units for the visualization, and configures layers such as x and y values, colors, and scale types. The community is encouraged to share thoughts and feedback on using Giraffe in their projects.

May 25th marks Towel Day, a celebration of Douglas Adams' work, particularly "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". Fans commemorate the author by carrying towels with them, inspired by a quote from the book: "A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have." The number 42 holds significance as the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. This year's Towel Day celebrations are limited due to the pandemic but fans can still participate online or at home by checking out live readings, competitions, and quotes from Douglas Adams' work.

InfluxDB Enterprise is now available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace, allowing users to provision and deploy the industry-leading time series database in 33 Azure regions worldwide. The solution provides deployment flexibility, flexible analytics, and scalability, making it suitable for various use cases such as IoT sensor data collection, server infrastructure monitoring, and user experience data analysis. With InfluxDB Enterprise on Azure, users can benefit from broad observability, highly configurable queries, anomaly detection, and alerting capabilities. Additionally, the solution integrates seamlessly with Azure Monitor, enabling users to store data in InfluxDB for years at no additional cost and leveraging advanced analytics options via InfluxQL and Flux. The pricing model is flexible, starting at $0.64/core/hour, and offers streamlined purchase, support, and budget reports, making it an attractive option for developers, SREs, and engineering teams.

Telegraf 1.14.3 has been released, including improvements to plugins such as IPMI Sensor Input, InfluxDB v1.x Output, and Dedup Processor, with fixes for issues related to parsing negative values, reconnection timeouts, and handling multiple metrics with the same timestamp.

LineMetrics, an Austrian company, developed a real-time asset monitoring solution that enables users to view sensor data in real-time without needing IT expertise. The company's IoT platform was built using InfluxDB, a time series database purpose-built for handling time series workloads. LineMetrics' use of InfluxDB allowed it to launch its IoT monitoring platform "as a service" with minimal complexity and no programming required, enabling users to monitor various assets such as energy consumption and machine performance in real-time. The integration of InfluxDB at the heart of their architecture enabled LineMetrics to provide a cost-effective and highly competitive solution for industrial IoT data monitoring and analytics.

Monitoring a pulse oximeter with InfluxDB is a method used by Mike Hinkle, a parent, to track his daughter's health in real-time. He uses time-stamped data stored in InfluxDB to analyze trends and patterns in her oxygen levels and heart rate. This allows him to better understand her health status and identify potential issues before they become severe. With the help of Grafana, Mike can visualize the data and create dashboards that provide valuable insights into his daughter's condition. Additionally, he is exploring environmental factors such as barometric pressure, temperature, and humidity that may impact his daughter's health, with the goal of identifying correlations between these variables and her oxygen levels or heart rate. By using InfluxDB to collect and analyze data, Mike aims to improve his daughter's treatment and provide more effective care for her hydrocephalus and VP shunt.

A new release of InfluxDB 2.0 Beta is available now, featuring enhancements such as InfluxDB Templates with Stacks for stateful asset management, improved native UI with bug fixes and usability issues addressed, and an upgraded Flux version v0.67 with many bug fixes and enhancements. These beta builds are not intended for performance or production usage, but rather to gather feedback from users in the InfluxDB Community Slack and GitHub Repo. The release includes various improvements such as threshold checks for values of zero, improved keyboard shortcuts, and rendering issues addressed on Firefox and Safari browsers.

InfluxDB Cloud is a time series database as a service that allows users to monitor their data and systems by setting up alerts. To set up alerts, users need to write a Flux query that runs on a schedule using the aggregateWindow function to examine changes over time intervals. The query is then converted into a task that can be saved and updated in the InfluxDB Cloud interface. A dashboard can be created to visualize the task output, and a check for the alert can be set up using threshold checks. Finally, a notification endpoint is set up, and notification rules are created to send alerts about critical data. The process requires understanding of Flux queries, tasks, dashboards, checks, and notification endpoints.

The first-ever virtual InfluxDays is coming up on June 23rd & 24th, featuring a lineup of thought leaders from organizations like Volvo, Grafana, BAI Communications, and Redmonk sharing their experiences with leveraging time series data in real-life use cases. The event will provide attendees with first-hand knowledge and inspiration to build and optimize DevOps infrastructure, application monitoring, real-time analytics, and IoT applications for maximum business value. The speakers include Paul Dix, InfluxData Founder and CTO, who will deliver the opening keynote and present updates on InfluxDB, as well as other experts in the field, such as James Governor from Redmonk, who will discuss how developers are using time series data in their applications. Registration for the event is completely free, making it an accessible opportunity for attendees to learn about time series databases and their applications.

Datadog and InfluxDB are two monitoring platforms that cater to different needs of DevOps teams and engineers. While both solutions aim to make things easier for engineering teams, they approach monitoring from different starting points. Datadog started as an application purpose-built for infrastructure monitoring and expanded its offerings to include performance management, logs, security, and more. In contrast, InfluxDB is an open-source time series data platform that can be used for a wide range of purposes, including monitoring. Many customers use both solutions, with some preferring InfluxDB for infrastructure monitoring and Datadog for application performance management metrics. The main reasons for using both platforms are the limitations in Datadog's pricing and flexibility. InfluxDB is generally more cost-effective, especially for large-scale infrastructure monitoring, and offers greater flexibility due to its deployability on multiple cloud providers and self-hosting options. Additionally, InfluxDB provides a broader observability with its Telegraf and FluentD plugins, allowing for seamless data integration across the DevOps toolchain. Overall, InfluxDB is a more flexible and cost-effective alternative to Datadog, offering a range of analytics and monitoring capabilities that cater to the evolving needs of modern applications.

In celebration of Star Wars Day (May 4th), a community of developers at Sensu, InfluxData, and InfluxAces crowdsourced opinions on various Star Wars-related questions. The results showed that Darth Vader is the favorite villain across all companies, followed closely by Jar Jar Binks. Mos Eisley Cantina was the most popular planet/location among the respondents, with the Millennium Falcon and Hoth being close seconds. Notably, original Yoda won over Baby Yoda as fan favorite by a slim margin. The community's opinions were gathered using InfluxDB, which helped to query cross-company data and provide insights into the Star Wars fandom.

This maintenance release of Chronograf includes several key fixes, including resolving an issue with OAuth logins and updating the expiration time of JWT tokens to match session token logout times, which should improve overall stability and security for users. The latest releases can be downloaded by community members from a specified link. For more information, community forums or support contact can be reached out to.