April 2021 Summaries

Telegraf 1.18.2 has been released as a maintenance update with several improvements. The JSON format now supports null values for successful detection and returns an empty metric without errors. The common.shim has been updated to accept larger inputs from the scanner, while the APCUPSD Input plugin resolves an ALARMDEL bug in a forked repository. Other updates include support for float64 in Converter Processor, NFS Client Input, SNMP Input, Sumo Logic Output, and VMware vSphere Input. The MetricLookback setting has been added to handle reporting delays in vCenter 6.7 and later. OPC UA Client Input error handling has also been fixed.

InfluxDB OSS 2.0.6 has been released with several improvements and bug fixes. The release includes a new Windows preview build, updated InfluxDB Web Interface, CLI improvements, and Flux upgrades. Additionally, the /debug/vars endpoint has been removed for security reasons, and the default query concurrency has been changed to unlimited. Users are recommended to upgrade to 2.0.6 as soon as possible due to a regression in the previous release that caused some instances of upgrades from 1.x to fail to start.

Deploying Services with Docker, NGINX, Route 53 & Let’s Encrypt is a detailed guide on how to deploy multiple services such as Let's Encrypt for generating wildcard certificates, Route 53 for registering A and CNAME records, and NGINX for reverse proxy with SNI encapsulation. The author uses Docker to manage these services and provides an example deployment using InfluxDB service. He also discusses the importance of communication flow, DNS resolution, Let's Encrypt, and NGINX with SNI in this process.

InfluxData, a leading time series database creator, has announced three leadership promotions - Barbara Nelson as Vice President of Applications, Rick Spencer as Vice President of Platform, and Marc Kaplan as Vice President of Technical Services. These appointments aim to strengthen the company's product and support teams. The new VPs bring extensive experience in their respective fields and have been instrumental in InfluxData's growth and success.

InfluxDB has released maintenance updates for both its open source (OSS) and enterprise versions, 1.8.5. The update includes improvements in tooling, logging, performance, and defect fixes. For the OSS version, a new influx_inspect report-disk command allows users to find which measurements or shards are contributing to disk size, useful for capacity planning and managing storage requirements. InfluxDB Enterprise 1.8.5 also includes specific improvements and defect fixes related to backup, anti-entropy, and security.

InfluxDB is a time series database that allows users to store, query, and visualize data in real-time. It is designed for handling large amounts of high-velocity data generated by IoT devices, sensors, and other sources. The key features of InfluxDB include: 1. Time Series Data Model: InfluxDB stores time series data as a sequence of values indexed by time. This allows for efficient storage and retrieval of large amounts of high-velocity data. 2. Query Language: InfluxQL is a powerful query language that enables users to perform complex queries on their data, including aggregations, filtering, and joining multiple data sources. 3. Real-time Processing: InfluxDB can process incoming data in real-time, allowing for near-instantaneous analysis and visualization of live data streams. 4. Scalability: InfluxDB is designed to scale horizontally across multiple servers, enabling it to handle large amounts of data and high query loads. 5. Visualization: InfluxDB integrates with the open-source visualization tool Grafana, allowing users to create custom dashboards and visualizations for their data. 6. Telegraf Integration: InfluxDB is part of the TICK stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, Kapacitor), which provides a complete solution for collecting, storing, processing, and visualizing time series data. Overall, InfluxDB is a versatile and powerful tool for handling time series data, with applications in IoT, monitoring, DevOps, and more.

InfluxData has released InfluxDB Notebooks, a new feature aimed at enhancing collaboration among teams working with time series data. This capability allows developers to discuss time series data analyses and trends within the platform rather than using third-party messaging applications, thus improving productivity. InfluxDB Notebooks enables users to create durable artifacts that showcase how time series data is analyzed to solve business problems. The company plans to release InfluxDB Annotations soon, another feature designed to add notes directly on dashboard cells for quicker highlighting and explaining of anomalies in time series data.

- The XML Parser is a plugin for Telegraf that allows users to parse XML data into metrics, tags, and fields. - XPath queries are used in the configuration of the parser to specify which nodes should be selected from the XML document. - The [inputs.http] section of the configuration file specifies the URLs where the XML data can be retrieved. - The [inputs.http.xml] section contains settings for parsing the XML data into metrics, tags, and fields. - The parser supports multiple nodes selection, field selectors for batch processing, and other advanced features.

This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to configure a Slack notification with InfluxDB. It explains how to create a Slack Notification Endpoint by navigating to the Alerts page and selecting Slack as the destination for alert statuses. The article also demonstrates how to create a Slack Notification Rule, which specifies the conditions of a check so that an alert is sent to the Notification Endpoint. Finally, it provides tips on optimizing InfluxDB usage and encourages users to share their experiences with the platform.

The article discusses how Python, OpenCV (Open Source Computer Vision Library), and InfluxDB can be used together to control crowds by detecting faces and counting them in real-time. This technology has numerous applications such as tracking the number of people entering a store or passing through an avenue, understanding customer behavior, and overseeing crowds for public safety during a pandemic. The code for this project is available on GitHub, and it involves setting up InfluxDB to receive data from OpenCV face detection. This solution can be used in various scenarios like controlling traffic flow on highways or avenues, monitoring crowd movement in parks, restaurants, or fairs, and ensuring public safety during a pandemic.

Telegraf 1.18.1 is a maintenance release that includes improvements such as closing running outputs when agent reloads on SIGHUP, fixing panics in various inputs and outputs, and enhancing the efficiency of retrieving interface names. The binaries for this open source release can be found on InfluxData's downloads page. Issues or questions related to Telegraf can be posted in their GitHub repo or community site.

The article describes a project that tracks the International Space Station's (ISS) position live and documents its journey using InfluxDB, ExpressJS, Telegraf, and Giraffe. The primary components of this project are the Telegraf config, the ExpressJS API server, and the React application. Data is collected from a public API using Telegraf, which then sends the location data to an InfluxDB cloud instance running in AWS. An API is built using ExpressJS to query the InfluxDB instance, and the React app uses InfluxData's Giraffe visualization library to plot the ISS's flight path. The article also discusses how to use Flux queries to shape data and return positional data as a track.

InfluxDB is a time series database that has been embraced by the IoT community for its ability to handle vast quantities of sensor and device data. It offers several benefits such as proven reliability, scalability, extensibility, flexibility, and contextuality. The article discusses how InfluxDB can be used in IoT telemetry and provides insights into planning an IoT data architecture. It also highlights recent developments that have made InfluxDB even better at handling IoT data. These include enhancements to Telegraf for acquiring and enriching IoT telemetry data, support for geotemporal queries, and the ability to operate using local IoT telemetry data.

Kapacitor 1.5.9 has been released with several improvements and bug fixes. Gzip compression is now turned on by default for data being written to InfluxDB, addressing a previous issue where large batch writes were not completely getting written to InfluxDB. Event handlers have also been updated, including the addition of new event handlers such as BigPanda and Microsoft Teams. Support for HTTP sources in SideLoadNode has been added, along with performance and security improvements like the introduction of the InfluxDB subscription-path option. The binaries for this release can be found on the downloads page.