January 2021 Summaries

A new maintenance release for Kapacitor is available now, addressing security vulnerabilities by updating package validation mechanics to use SHA-256 instead of MD5. This update includes various fixes and improvements, such as added support for HTTP sources in SideLoadNode, performance enhancements, and bug fixes. Specifically, Kapacitor now sends data to InfluxDB compressed as gzip by default, preallocates GroupIDs to increase performance, and addresses issues with the alert-handler match function. The release is available on the downloads page, and users are encouraged to report any issues or questions through the InfluxDB Community Slack or Github Repo.

InfluxDays EMEA 2021 is a virtual event focused on time series data, scheduled for May 18-19, 2021, with a call for papers open until a certain date. The event will feature training, on-demand sessions, and live keynotes, providing attendees with knowledge about time series applications and use cases. InfluxDays aims to inspire the open source community by sharing time series use cases, technical expertise, and innovative solutions. Speakers are invited to share their experiences and insights on various topics related to InfluxDB, including machine learning, RESTful APIs, IoT event processing, and real-time streaming analytics. The event is expected to be engaging, with opportunities for networking, Q&A sessions, and post-conference resources such as YouTube recordings and SlideShare presentations.

InfluxDB is being used for security monitoring at InfluxData, a time series database that efficiently queries data necessary for security investigations, such as who accessed what, from where, and when. The company collects authentication events from Google Workspace audit logging services and uses Telegraf PubSub plugin to collect these events in the future. Data collection involves polling programs or using tools like NodeJS, and data storage is done on InfluxDB Cloud service. A basic information model is used for normalization of collected data, including timestamps, company account IDs, usernames, user IDs, user domains, authentication types, and results. Visualization involves creating dashboards with general usage metrics, success vs. failure counts, account and address cardinality, results over time charts, and a list of authentication event details. The dashboard is built using Flux queries that view unique accounts, authentication attempts, successful and failed attempts, average address cardinality per account, total account cardinality per address, authentication results, and latest authentication events. The company advocates for cloud software vendors to make security events widely available via APIs, especially authentication events, to build trust in their products, as seen in the industry comparison with the car industry where safety features come standard. InfluxDB OSS and Enterprise products produce detailed authorization and activity logs that are available through marketplaces like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Telegraf, an open-source server agent for collecting metrics from stacks, has released version 1.17.2, which includes improvements such as support for setting the interface in native mode using either the name or IP address and resolving a regression from the previous release. The binaries for this latest open source release can be found on InfluxData's downloads page.

InfluxData's InfluxDB Cloud is now SOC 2 certified, Type I and Type II compliant. This certification provides assurance to customers that their data is being managed in a controlled and audited environment, meeting the standards of Service Organization Control reporting platform. The SOC 2 audit focused on availability, monitoring, auditing, and alerting, highlighting InfluxDB Cloud's steps to ensure continual availability and security. Achieving SOC 2 compliance allows customers to quickly weed out vendors that haven't invested in policies and processes to earn their trust, making it easier for larger companies to require this certification. This certification is essential for technology-based service organizations storing customer data in the cloud, and it will help InfluxDB Cloud become a more attractive option for businesses seeking to improve their security posture.

InfluxData has achieved SOC 2 Type II certification for its cloud-based time series platform, InfluxDB Cloud, demonstrating its ability to implement critical security policies and prove compliance over an extended period. The company's commitment to protecting customer data is highlighted by the certification, which was granted after an audit conducted by Coalfire. To maintain this level of security, InfluxData plans to perform a SOC 2 Type II audit and accreditation on an annual basis. This achievement underscores InfluxData's dedication to transparency in its security efforts and compliance with industry standards.

A new maintenance release for Telegraf 1.17.1 has been made available, including improvements such as added Event Log support for Windows platforms, performance optimization, and fixes for various plugins like HTTP Listener v2, Prometheus Input, and more. The release also includes updates to dependencies and adds support for Apple M1 devices and RISC-V Linux builds.

This article from Codebase, a UC Berkeley student organization, describes their collaboration with InfluxData to add cloud-controlled configuration management features to Telegraf. The Telegraf Assistant is a tool that allows users to modify plugin configurations through HTTP operations without stopping the Telegraf service. It provides a unique identifier for each plugin and supports CRUD operations such as starting, stopping, updating, getting plugin details, and retrieving all available plugins. The assistant's source code can be found on the Codebase fork of the Telegraf GitHub branch, and InfluxData will review and merge it into the Telegraf product in production. The next challenge for the InfluxData engineering team is to get the Telegraf Assistant to work at scale in large enterprise environments.

This article discusses the importance of securing a server against unauthorized access attempts through Fail2ban, a software framework that helps harden server security by automatically blocking IP addresses that engage in suspicious activity. The author created an InfluxDB template to monitor Fail2ban metrics, providing insights into failed and banned IP addresses over time. The template allows users to visualize their entire monitoring configuration in one easily-shared text file, making it easy to set up and customize. Additionally, the article provides tips on how to secure an open SSH port, including using public key-based login and disabling password-based logins.

InfluxDB is a powerful time series database that allows users to capture and aggregate metrics at custom time groupings. To take it to the next level, downsampling and trending become critical. In this tutorial, we learn how to trend values over time using InfluxDB's SpeedTest Community Template, which downloads internet connectivity speeds every minute. We calculate the minimum, average, and maximum speeds over 5-minute intervals and write them to a new bucket called "speedtest-downsampled". The new bucket accumulates snapshots of the three aggregated data values, which can be queried over time and added to a dashboard. We also learn how to incorporate task outputs into InfluxDB dashboards and visualize the output with a graph (line) visualization.

InfluxData has appointed Vidya Peters to its Board of Directors, bringing a marketing background to the company for the first time. The appointment comes as InfluxData introduces an Advisory Board consisting of executives from HashiCorp, GitHub, Databricks, and ThoughtSpot. The new board members are expected to support strategic growth and provide expertise in cloud and developer-focused business. InfluxData has experienced exponential growth in its cloud business and is well-positioned to capitalize on the growing market opportunity for time series data. With InfluxDB as its leading time series platform, the company empowers developers to build transformative IoT, analytics, and monitoring applications.

InfluxDB is a platform for builders that enables developers to create unique solutions with its core at the center. The Built on InfluxDB program showcases various use cases and applications built on top of InfluxData technologies, inspiring others to build their own creations. This program features special graphic badges and a social hashtag to indicate projects are built on InfluxDB, providing customers with confidence in the solution's capabilities. By participating, developers can share their project stories and potentially be featured on the InfluxData website, earning an InfluxData hoodie as a reward. The program aims to discover and share exciting projects with the broader time series community, promoting collaboration and innovation.

Running InfluxDB 2.0 and Telegraf using Docker allows developers to deploy these applications in a containerized environment, providing isolation, ease of deployment, and management. To do this, Docker must be installed on the local machine, and then the official images for Telegraf and InfluxDB 2.0 must be pulled from the Docker Hub. A new Docker network is created, and containers are run with specific arguments to connect them to the network and expose ports. Persistent storage is configured by mounting volumes to the container's configuration directories. The InfluxDB UI can be accessed at http://localhost:8086, and Telegraf configuration parameters must match InfluxDB setup parameters. Docker Compose can also be used to define and deploy multiple services, including InfluxDB, Telegraf, and an influxdb_cli service for setting up the InfluxDB instance.

InfluxData's Outreach Club launched the "New Year, New Do: December Donation Initiative" in December 2020, which aimed to raise money for nonprofits supporting children, food insecurity, and disaster relief. Employees could donate to select organizations and vote for their founder/CTO Paul Dix's new hair color, with the option receiving the most votes determining his next hairstyle. The initiative was a success, raising over $20,000 and matching up to $5,000 through InfluxData's own donation. The company also created a real-time dashboard using its product InfluxDB to track donations, engaging employees in the process.

The author shares their personal experience with manually monitoring SSL certificate expiration dates in a previous role, which led them to create an InfluxDB template for automating this task. The X.509 SSL Certificate Monitoring Template allows users to quickly define their entire monitoring configuration in one text file and can handle multiple certificates at once. It is free to use with an InfluxDB account and simple to set up, making it a practical solution for businesses to monitor certificate expiration dates and prevent potential financial losses and bad customer experiences. The template uses the x509 Telegraf plugin and can be used in corporate environments or directly in the certificate store.

InfluxData, a company behind the time series database InfluxDB, has experienced significant growth in 2020, with exponential cloud expansion, an expanded user base, and major new customers including Zoom, Rolls-Royce, China Mobile, Virgin Money, and GoPay. The demand for time series platforms continues to rise, driven by the increasing volume of data produced each year, especially from IoT sensors and applications. InfluxDB has seen a 13x increase in paying cloud customers and a nearly 5x increase in developers using its free tier, with over 450,000 daily active instances running globally. The company's open source community has also grown, with the launch of a new project, InfluxDB IOx, which expands possibilities for projects running on InfluxDB. New customers include major companies like Disney and Merck & Co., demonstrating the platform's versatility and adoption across various industries.

The Algorithmia platform accelerates machine learning (ML) model development by providing a secure and efficient way to deploy and manage models in production. The platform's recently introduced feature, Algorithmia Insights, offers a flexible integration solution for ML model performance monitoring, enabling data scientists to evaluate model drift and perform model maintenance as needed. An InfluxDB Template is available to stream operational metrics and user-defined inference-related metrics from Algorithmia to InfluxDB, allowing users to gain insights into their models' performance with visualizations such as time series charts and dashboards. This template simplifies the process of monitoring ML workloads by providing pre-made dashboards, reducing the need for data scientists to focus on setting up monitoring configurations. By collecting and analyzing ML algorithm performance metrics in InfluxDB, users can successfully manage their ML life cycle and governance, including creating alerts and receiving notifications when algorithms require maintenance.

Strivve, a startup that aims to simplify the process of updating credit and debit cards by automating it, built its platform on top of InfluxDB Cloud, a hosted version of InfluxDB, due to its scalability, tag system, and cloud availability. Strivve's goal is to help card issuers capture lost revenue and gain visibility by automating the updating process, while also enhancing cardholder convenience and security. The company modified its machine learning system to ingest time-based site navigation events stored in InfluxDB, allowing it to structure data nicely for analysis and provide real-time dashboarding and trigger workflows. Strivve's platform, CardUpdatr, uses best-in-class security protocols to discover where cards are used for payments, navigate to login pages, and add new or updated payment cards on behalf of each user.

This tutorial discusses deploying InfluxDB inside a Kubernetes cluster and using its Python client to send data to it. The author assumes control of a Kubernetes cluster, installs and sets up kubectl, clones the repository containing the deployment script, applies the `influx.yaml` file to create the namespace, statefulset, and service for InfluxDB version 2.0.1, creates an ingress resource with the DNS name of the created cluster, and runs the Python client script to connect to InfluxDB via a generated token. The script defines a function `influx()` that uses the InfluxDBClient library to write data to InfluxDB every 5 seconds, including the free memory of the host in Gb. The tutorial concludes by highlighting various use cases for using the Python client with InfluxDB and providing related blog posts and resources.

InfluxDB's sFlow Monitoring Template provides visibility into network usage and active routes of high-speed networks, enabling effective control and management of network usage. This template uses packet sampling technology to provide continuous statistics on any protocol, allowing for a deeper look at network traffic patterns in an easy-to-visualize way. It can be used to find bandwidth hogs, detect and resolve network performance issues, track response time and availability of critical assets, and monitor network bandwidth performance. The template is easily shared and importable into InfluxDB with a single command, offering better visibility into "top talkers" on the network.