July 2022 Summaries

InfluxData has released new features and bug fixes for its product, including resources for Go developers, colorblind-friendly color palette options, a new Telegraf release with MQTT and SNMP updates, and various bug fixes to improve the user experience with InfluxDB Cloud. The company aims to meet the needs of developers by constantly improving its product to accelerate Time to Awesome.

In the world of competitive BBQ, temperature control is crucial for achieving tender and flavorful results. Low and slow smoking is a tried-and-true method that requires precise temperature control to prevent "stalls" or plateaus, where the internal temperature stops rising. InfluxDB, a time series database, can help pitmasters optimize their smoke performance by setting up alerts to notify them when they've hit the stall. Two InfluxDB users, Will Cooke and Scott Anderson, have found success in using InfluxDB to monitor their BBQ sessions, with Will building his own sensors and dashboards from scratch, and Scott utilizing a cloud-connected wireless meat thermometer that integrates seamlessly with InfluxDB's monitoring features. By leveraging InfluxDB's visualization tools and alerting API, these pitmasters can avoid the frustration of "the stall" and achieve perfect results every time.

The world is shifting towards a greener and more sustainable future, with battery technology playing a crucial role in environmentally friendly electric vehicles. Gotion, a company specializing in battery technology, uses InfluxDB to store and manage its large volumes of time series data from various sensors inside batteries. By leveraging client APIs, creating interactive dashboards, and integrating algorithms, Gotion has developed a system that detects temperature anomalies before thermal runaway occurs, making its batteries safer and more efficient. The use of InfluxDB enables the company to analyze data in real-time, apply complex algorithms, and send alerts when necessary.

Telegraf, an open-source monitoring system, is used to collect data from IoT devices such as energy meters. The author of the article had no prior experience with Telegraf but was able to onboard a Docker instance of Telegraf and start collecting data. However, processing the raw data proved to be a challenge. To overcome this challenge, the author built a custom plugin using Starlark, a programming language interface provided by Telegraf. The Starlark Processor Plugin allowed the author to transform power meter readings into more usable data for analysis and visualization. The plugin used a state machine approach to "remember" prior measurements and calculate differences between them. This enabled the creation of new fields in the measurement data, such as delta power, which provided valuable insights into the energy production and consumption. The use of Starlark in Telegraf provides additional functionality beyond what is available with other plugins, allowing for sophisticated computations and data manipulation.

Kubernetes is becoming a leading tool for implementing edge computing in tech stacks, offering benefits such as cost savings, improved performance, reliability, security, and scalability. By utilizing Kubernetes, companies can deploy edge computing solutions that are more efficient, reliable, and secure. KubeEdge is an open-source framework built on top of Kubernetes that provides features such as resiliency, low-resource footprint, scalability, and security for edge computing use cases. It offers a toolkit for deploying machine learning models and supports various protocols like MQTT for IoT workloads. With KubeEdge, developers can deploy and manage containerized applications in the cloud and on the edge using the same unified platform.

Telegraf 1.23.3 has been released, featuring updates to the common plugin and input plugins, including fixes for issues with OpenStack, MQTT consumer, SNMP trap, and SQL Server inputs. The parser plugin also received updates, including changes to the Prometheus parser. Additionally, dependencies have been updated and users can test bug fixes and features by joining the InfluxDB Community Slack or GitHub Repo.

eSoftThings has developed an IoT platform called eSoftLink that uses InfluxDB and Telegraf to provide real-time energy management for consumers and utility companies. The solution allows users to track their energy consumption down to the appliance level, enabling them to make informed decisions about their energy usage. With its implementation of InfluxDB, eSoftThings can collect a large volume of time series data that provides value-added services while maintaining GDPR compliance. The platform's architecture includes an in-house-built message broker, Apache Zookeeper and Apache Kafka for handling huge data volumes quickly, InfluxDB for time series data, Telegraf for metrics collection, and Chart.js with PHP for dashboarding. eSoftLink is a versatile and robust end-to-end IoT platform designed to work as a stand-alone on customer infrastructure, on the Edge, or in the Cloud, providing real-time data collection, management, analytics, and reporting tools that allow enterprises to benefit from the data they collect quickly and efficiently.

The author, Tyler Nguyen, joined the Developer Relations team at InfluxDB as a summer intern in 2022 to gain experience in the computer science industry. He completed an introductory course on InfluxDB and then worked on a challenge that required him to write data to InfluxDB using various methods such as client libraries, API, CLI, and Telegraf plugins. He encountered issues with his Windows machine but resolved them by switching to MacOS. The challenge also involved creating automated tasks and custom dashboards to visualize the data. Through this experience, Tyler gained hands-on knowledge of InfluxDB and its ecosystem, developed problem-solving skills, and learned about teamwork and community engagement.

InfluxData, the creator of the leading time series platform InfluxDB, has been recognized by Comparably, a workplace culture and corporate brand reputation platform, for its company leadership and diversity. The company was selected from 70,000 companies across the U.S. and won recognition in four categories: Best CEOs for Women, Best CEOs for Diversity, Best Leadership Teams, and Best Career Growth. InfluxData's CEO, Evan Kaplan, attributes the recognition to the company's commitment to creating an inclusive culture that fosters growth, while InfluxData's Chief People Officer, Carolyn Moore, highlights the importance of employee sentiment in defining the organization's values. This recognition is part of a series of awards and recognitions received by InfluxData, including Comparably Awards for Best Company Outlook and Best Engineering Team, as well as Forbes' list of America's Best Startup Employers.

InfluxDB Cloud offers various benefits over the OSS account, including unified APIs, edge data replication, immense data processing capabilities, a managed serverless and elastic service, multi-tenanted horizontally scalable time series storage, and a unified developer experience. However, users must adapt to changing their approach when migrating from OSS to Cloud, particularly when executing heavy queries, as vertical scaling is not available in InfluxDB Cloud. To avoid query timeouts, users can utilize the Task system to offload query workloads, breaking down complex tasks into smaller ones that write intermediate values to new buckets, enabling faster execution and data redundancy across different buckets.

InfluxDB's Edge Data Replication (EDR) feature is designed to address the challenge of sharing data from edge nodes to a centralized cloud location. This feature facilitates efficient workflows between edge and cloud instances of InfluxDB, enabling users to control their data and use it more effectively. EDR is particularly useful for businesses that rely on highly distributed systems and applications, providing reliable, durable, and automatic replication of data from the edge to the cloud. With EDR, users can move data (or a subset) from the edge to the cloud, allowing them to access the data they need in real-time, while also reducing costs and improving efficiency by doing data transformations and aggregations on the edge before sending it to the cloud.

The community has spoken, and the demand for an interactive shell in InfluxDB V2 has been met, with improvements made to the new CLI. To access the interactive shell, users need to establish a connection config and map buckets to databases, before using the command "influx v1 shell". The interactive shell features autocompletion, navigation through previous commands, and a new table view for displaying query data. Users can also customize the timestamp format, data output formats, and even write metrics to InfluxDB manually. However, there are some caveats, including limitations on database creation from within the shell, and the need to create buckets and map them to databases. The feature is expected to be released soon, with a repo available for building the CLI from source.

Telegraf 1.23.2 has been released, addressing issues and improving various plugins, including the HTTP Input Plugin, SQL Server Input Plugin, GNMI Input Plugin, and SNMP Input Plugin. The new version restores old behavior for non-deprecated plugins and options, adds tests, and makes other updates to improve functionality and performance. Additionally, Telegraf's dependencies have been updated, and users are encouraged to test bug fixes and features by participating in the InfluxDB Community Slack or GitHub Repo.

InfluxDB is being used by EnerKey, a platform that helps organizations operate more sustainably by analyzing energy consumption and indoor air quality. The platform measures data from over 140,000 meters across 20,000 properties, handling various utility data formats in real-time to provide insights on energy usage. To handle the large amount of time series data, EnerKey chose InfluxDB, leveraging its capabilities to combine raw data with other building and environmental information to deliver actionable insights and forecast future energy usage. This helps users optimize energy efficiency, reducing costs by up to 30 percent, while making a positive impact on the environment.

InfluxDB offers powerful time series data capabilities, but can be intimidating due to its steep learning curve. Fortunately, it has over a dozen client libraries that allow developers to work with InfluxDB using their preferred programming language, reducing the need to learn a new language and focusing on code quality instead. The client libraries provide built-in tools for processing data in various formats, such as JSON files and dictionaries, making it easier to get started and convert data more easily. By choosing a familiar language, developers can write high-quality code that meets their project's needs.

InfluxDB's geo-temporal package is designed to handle large volumes of spatial and temporal data, enabling faster storage and querying capabilities. This is achieved through the use of S2 geometry, a system that divides the Earth into cells based on spherical projection, eliminating gaps and overlapping areas. By converting latitude and longitude data to an S2 cell ID using Flux's geo package, developers can subset their data to specific regions, set up alerts, and perform real-time applications with increased efficiency. This allows InfluxDB users to tackle complex applications such as tracking shipments, predicting weather patterns, and building fitness apps with improved performance and accuracy.

Nobl9 is a self-titled SLO management platform that provides real-time data to developers, DevOps practitioners, and reliability engineers to help build more reliable software. The company leverages InfluxDB as its time series database, utilizing it for data ingest, visualization, and export. Nobl9's integration with InfluxDB enables flexibility in writing queries and automating processes, allowing users to connect the platform to a wide range of tools and output sources. By building on InfluxDB, Nobl9 aims to empower site reliability engineers to set up automated alerting and make software more reliable, while continuing to explore new ways to utilize SLOs for its customers.

InfluxData has welcomed a diverse group of interns from various universities across the United States for its summer internship program, including Alex Wang, Andrew Depke, Andrew Lee, Cecilia Li, David Rusnak, Neema Sadry, Ian Dong, Rahul Sivakkannan, Rushil Shah, and Tyler Nguyen. The interns are distributed across different teams such as UI, Automation/Compute, Edge, People Operations, UI, Ecommerce, Flux, and Developer Relations. They have been working on various projects including invokable scripts, internal tooling, porting InfluxQL shell, learning Human Resource Management platforms, building a DIY audio guestbook, General Marketplace Simulators, and designing a new repo for the Flux language. The interns have also enjoyed learning about software development processes, collaborating with teams, and gaining industry-level experience in frontend development. They are from top universities such as Stanford, Colorado School of Mines, University of Utah, San Jose State University, Cornell University, Wayne State University College of Engineering, UC San Diego, New York University, and University of California, Irvine. The interns have diverse interests including travel, fitness, sports, photography, videography, playing piano, video games, cooking, and playing cricket.

This new maintenance release of Telegraf, version 1.23.1, is now available and includes several key updates, such as restored sample configurations, input plugin improvements, parser updates, and dependency upgrades. The RabbitMQ Input plugin no longer requires listeners to be present in the RabbitMQ /api/overview JSON, while MongoDB Input plugin filters out views in MongoDB lookup. Additionally, Telegraf has updated various dependencies, including cloud.google.com/go/monitoring and k8s.io/client-go, to their latest versions. Users can download the latest release from the InfluxDB website and report any issues or questions through the InfluxDB Community Slack or GitHub Repo.

The MQTT Consumer Plugin for Telegraf allows users to read data from an MQTT broker and pivot it into a horizontal format, similar to pivoting data in Flux, enabling easier data analysis and representation. By using the Pivot Processor plugin, users can transform their data into a more readable format by rotating values from vertical to horizontal, reducing the number of metrics being sent and making it easier to parse data in various formats such as JSON. This allows for a friendlier format for parsing, enabling users to reference field names and creating a structure that is widely accepted within JSON parsing architectures.