Presentation on InfluxDB & Grafana @ OC Tanner. 9 September 2015.

1. InfluxDB & Grafana
@ OC Tanner
by Pedro Salgado

2. 1-slide intro to InfluxDB
• “InfluxDB is a time series, metrics, and analytics database.
• It’s written in Go and has no external dependencies.
• That means once you install it there’s nothing else to manage
(such as Redis, ZooKeeper, Cassandra, HBase, or anything else).
• InfluxDB is targeted at use cases for DevOps, metrics, sensor
data, and real-time analytics.
• It arose from our need for a database like this on more than a few
previous products we’ve built.”
• source: influxdb.com

3. – Mark Twain
“Get your facts first,
then you can distort them as you please.”

4. Time-series
• “A time series is a sequence of data points, typically
consisting of successive measurements made over a
time interval.
• Examples of time series are ocean tides, counts of
sunspots, and the daily closing value of the Dow
Jones Industrial Average.
• Time series are very frequently plotted via line charts.”
• source: wikipedia

5. Data point
• “In statistics, a data point or observation is a set
of one or more measurements on a single
member of a statistical population.“
• source: wikipedia

6. Measurement
• “Measurement is the assignment of a number to
a characteristic of an object or event, which can
be compared with other objects or events.
• The scope and application of a measurement is
dependent on the context and discipline.
• source: wikipedia

7. Example in InfluxDB terms
• time series
• internal and external temperature for machine X type Y in time interval
• measurement : temperature
• tag set : machine, type
• field set : internal_temperature, external_temperature
• temperature,machine=unit42,type=assembly internal=32,external=100
1434055562000000035
• filtering done on tags
• computation / analysis done on fields
• fields aren’t indexed

8. • data written using line protocol
• [key] [point] [timestamp]
• key = <measurement>,<tag set>
• temperature,machine=unit42,type=assembly
• point = <field set>
• internal=32,external=100
• timestamp
• 1434055562000000035
• there can only be one point for a series and timestamp
• you define precision of point (s, ms, μs, ns)
• you define how long data is kept : retention policy (replication, duration)

9. Other interesting features
• continuous queries
• clustering (alpha)

10. Grafana
• “An open source, feature rich metrics dashboard
and graph editor for Graphite, InfluxDB &
OpenTSDB”
• source: grafana.org

11. “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

12. • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_series
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_point
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement
• https://influxdb.com/docs/v0.9/introduction/
overview.html
• https://influxdb.com/docs/v0.9/concepts/glossary.html
• http://grafana.org/
• https://github.com/steenzout/

13. – Dr Seuss
“Don't cry because it's over,
smile because it happened.”