August 2021 Summaries

Becky Rivera shares her positive interview experience with InfluxData, which led her to join the company. She highlights the supportive environment, open-ended conversations about problems faced by each team, and genuine care for employee well-being. Since starting at InfluxData, she has found that the company's values are consistently followed in practice. Rivera encourages others to consider joining the organization as it continues to grow.

Hands-On Flux Training returns by popular demand as part of InfluxDays NA 2021 Virtual Experience on October 11-12, with only 50 spots available to ensure an ideal student-to-teacher ratio. The course uses an IoT-sensor-enabled pizza oven and corresponding time-stamped data as an example. Flux is a powerful data scripting and query language developed by the creators of InfluxDB, designed for ETL, monitoring, and alerting. Over two half-days, participants will learn Flux basics, data analysis and preparation, custom alerts, time series forecasting, anomaly detection, and more. The virtual training registration fee is $500 and automatically registers attendees for InfluxDays North America Virtual Experience 2021.

InfluxDB has introduced a new option to explicitly define the schema of data that can be written to a bucket. This feature helps protect against unwanted changes in the schema as more users add their own data. The explicit schema is specific to each measurement written to a bucket, allowing it to grow as new measurements are added. Users can create schemas for each measurement they want to store in the bucket, and any data that doesn't match one of the measurement schemas will be rejected from the bucket.

This tutorial teaches how to set up a time series database (TSDB) in a C# application using InfluxDB. TSDBs are ideal for handling large data sets focused on time stamps or time-based queries, and InfluxDB is the most popular choice. The article guides users through installing InfluxDB using Docker, creating a .NET console application, and writing/reading data to/from InfluxDB. It also demonstrates how to use Flux query language for more complex queries against stored data.

InfluxData is giving out Community Awards for those who have made significant contributions to their products or community over the past year. Nominations are open for award categories including InfluxDB, Telegraf, Flux Language, and Community. Award winners receive a personalized trophy highlighting their contribution and recognition from the whole community. The nomination period closes on September 30th, with winners announced live at InfluxDays North America on October 27th.

On August 16, 2021, an unexpected change occurred in the package repositories of InfluxDB, Telegraf, and Chronograf RPM packages due to an edge case in automation logic. The issue was related to timestamp-based signatures only, with no changes made to the contents of the packages themselves. Affected packages include chronograf-1.9.0..rpm for x86_64, arm64, armel, i386; influxdb-1.8.9..rpm for aarch64, x86_64, armel, armv7hl, i386; and telegraf-1.19.2-1..rpm for aarch64, x86_64, armel, i386. The issue has been resolved by patching the logic error that caused it.

Telegraf 1.19.3 has been released as a maintenance update with several improvements. The release includes updated dependencies for various modules, including sirupsen/logrus, testcontainers/testcontainers-go, golang/snappy, aws/aws-sdk-go-v2, sensu/go, and hashicorp/consul/api. Additionally, the update fixes issues in Clickhouse Input, Kubernetes Inventory Input, OPC-UA Input, PostgreSQL Input, Prometheus Input, Redis Input, vSphere Input, CrateDB Output, Grafana Loki Output, and AWS EC2 Processor. The latest open source release binaries can be found on the downloads page.

InfluxDB Cloud has introduced a built-in secrets management system powered by Vault secret store to provide users with a secure secret store for storing sensitive information such as passwords, API keys, and other security credentials when writing Flux scripts. The capability is now available directly in the InfluxDB Cloud web interface, allowing users to quickly add or update secrets without working with the API.

Merrick Tian shares their positive experience as an intern at InfluxData. They appreciate how their team members allowed them to explore and learn independently while still offering support when needed. During the internship, they gained valuable programming experience, improved their version control skills with Git, and contributed to various components of the company's software. Tian also highlights a challenging project that involved creating a SimpleTable component in the Giraffe library, which ultimately helped them grow as a developer. Overall, they feel proud of their contributions during their time at InfluxData.

This article provides a detailed explanation on how to use Flux queries in InfluxDB Cloud or InfluxDB v2 for aggregating data across tags or fields, as well as ungrouping by using the group() function. It covers understanding the group key and its effect on table stream output, performing aggregations across fields or measurements, and ungrouping data with an empty group() Flux function. The article also includes a sample dataset to explore Flux and provides tips for interpreting Annotated CSV outputs.

InfluxDB OSS 2.0.8 has been released with new features, fixes, and improvements. The release includes a disable option for the browser UI, upgraded Flux to v0.124.0, and fixed various issues such as parsing influxd upgrade CLI prompts in Windows PowerShell. Additionally, starting from version 2.1.0, InfluxDB CLI will be released from the influx-cli repository instead of the InfluxDB repository. The macOS build for this release requires at least version 10.12 Sierra to run due to an upgrade in go version.

Lucas Anzoategui shares his positive experience as an intern at InfluxData during the pandemic. Despite initial nervousness, he found a welcoming environment with clear expectations from his team members. The company also organized weekly meetings for interns to learn more about the company and participate in fun activities like virtual escape rooms. Lucas gained valuable skills such as using Marketo and Wrike, and appreciated the supportive work culture at InfluxData. He believes that this unique work environment is a key factor contributing to the company's growth.

Jamie Strandboge shares his journey from an English major with a passion for music to a career in computer science and open source software development. He joined InfluxData after realizing that the company's mission of providing great tools and experiences for developers aligns perfectly with his own values. Strandboge appreciates InfluxData's commitment to open source, distributed work environment, and inclusive culture.

Cat Stevens shares her journey to joining InfluxData, highlighting the company's core values and commitment to open source. She emphasizes the supportive work environment and continuous learning culture at InfluxData. The author also mentions her role in marketing and how she collaborates with her team on a daily basis.

A group of interns at InfluxData developed a platform that tracks real-time COVID-19 data from across the United States. The project aimed to make critical information about COVID-19 more accessible, including vaccination rates and the number of positive cases for a given location. They used Telegraf to ingest data systematically and in a repeatable fashion, and InfluxDB Cloud free service to query and visualize their data. The interns created three dashboards for their graphs and maps, showing statistics on COVID-19 cases and deaths alongside the percentage of fully vaccinated people, number of deaths and confirmed cases in each county, and vaccination rates of each state. They also set up four different Telegraf configurations to pull in data from various API endpoints. The project faced challenges such as cardinality and query write limit issues, but they were able to overcome them with effective communication and help from mentors.

Maintenance releases for InfluxDB Enterprise and OSS 1.8.9 are now available. These maintenance releases provide fixes for community members and customers who do not wish to upgrade to a more current version at this time. The current versions of InfluxDB OSS and Enterprise are 2.0.7 and 1.9.3, respectively. There is API compatibility of v1 and v2 for the read and write APIs across all editions, including OSS, Enterprise, and Cloud.

Ranged Annotations have been introduced in InfluxDB Cloud, allowing users to add annotations to individual points or ranges on their dashboard graphs. This feature aims to improve data sharing and collaboration within teams by providing contextual information about the data being shown in a graph. The new ranged annotations can be added quickly and easily by holding down the shift key and clicking or dragging across the desired area of a graph. These annotations are visible to other members of the organization when they have the annotations button turned on in their dashboard.

Brian Gilmore shares his diverse career background and explains why he joined InfluxData. He values the company's focus on democratizing data, integrating human experience into analytics strategies, and its leadership in technology that impacts various industries. Gilmore highlights InfluxData's positive work culture and commitment to making the world a better place through technology.

The article discusses how GitHub Actions can be used with InfluxDB for automating data generation, managing GitOps workflows, and more. It introduces a new InfluxDB GitHub Action that allows users to configure specific versions of InfluxDB or use keywords like "latest" or "nightly." The author also highlights various ways to integrate InfluxDB with GitHub Actions for data validation, conversion, and visualization. They demonstrate how to convert CSV data into line protocol format using the InfluxDB Command Line Tooling and then further convert it into Flux's Annotated CSV format for easier ingestion into an InfluxDB Cloud account. The author also shares their experience of using GitHub Actions internally in various ways and encourages readers to join their Community Slack channel to share their thoughts and ideas.

Rick King shares his reasons for joining InfluxData, highlighting the positive learning environment, passion for core values, and opportunities to contribute to the team's growth. He emphasizes the excitement of working with an open source technology company that focuses on customer satisfaction and continuous innovation. As a member of the Support Team, King aims to be a reliable source of information and support while fostering a positive influence within the organization.

InfluxDB Cloud has introduced a new Map graph type to help users visualize time series data that includes position. The new Maps visualization type can be used with geotemporal data stored as fields or the S2 cells stored as tags in your dataset. Users can leverage sample datasets such as USGS Earthquake and NOAA National Buoy Data Center for testing purposes. The Map graph type allows users to configure a value to use to change the colors of the markers on the map, providing new insights and allowing them to find patterns that they may have otherwise overlooked.