If I have a regret in my observability stack I think it’s got to be influxdb.<p>I bought in to the TICK stack and planned on using an enterprise support contract when going to production, but every interaction with InfluxData the company has felt a bit sleazy. Trying to push very hard to the cloud offering for example.<p>That’s bad enough, but the documentation and observability of the database is quite poor, and it’s trivially easy to “vanish” all your data and lock your instance up for hours or days by changing the retention policy of a database. (Not making it much different).<p>Now of course it’s not TICK at all. More like “TI” as kapacitor and chonograph (dashboarding and alerting respectively) are deprecated products and rolled in to the main offering.<p>Added to that they completely changed the query language.<p>I have to say; pick something better if you can. TimescaleDB or Prometheus (which uses openTSDB) are promising.
It is strange that there isn’t more overlap between tech software monitoring and metrics products and industrial historians and HMI products. Osisoft was purchased by Aveva/Schneider for 5 billion despite them already owning citect, wonderware, and probably 6 other historian products.<p>The industrial historians solve the same problems - collect data at nodes that might have intermittent connectivity, send to a centralized server/service that can handle lots of data, and allow users to plot it.<p>I wonder if we’ll start to see more open source monitoring on the factory floor. While it will be easy for a product to work as well as industrial offerings, maybe their value is in the long term support (usually close to a decade) and supporter upgrade paths.
For some use cases, you wouldn't even need Grafana. You could use the graphing/visualization and alerting functionality built into the InfluxDB 2.0.<p>That said, Grafana is a more mature product. I can't fault anyone for using InfluxDB just as a time series database and using Grafana for visualization and alerting.
I’ve had a basic influxdb/grafana setup going for a year or so. Despite having worked with it for a while, I always am left with the feeling that I’m missing something.<p>The sql-like language is similar enough that it’s confusing. And I’m still not sure why a dedicated time series database is supposed to be better than using standard mysql/postgres with inserts. At least the you get a wider range of options for data types, indexing, and querying.<p>I’m likely still not in the correct mindset but not sure what I’m missing.
Telegraf is an awesome agent, and also pairs really nicely with Prometheus as a TSDB, then you can put Grafana on top.<p>Maybe not in this specific case, but in general Prometheus my preferred TSDB sitting between Telegraf and Grafana<p>If you need further scale-out there are options for federating Prometheus instances as well.
SaaS version of that would be use Telegraf, but send data to Sumo Logic, Data Dog or other observability vendor. I would also<p>You don't need to host InfluxDb and Grafana yourself. I would also consider gathering logs and traces to troubleshoot problems. Straightforward with top tier observability vendors, harder to do it on your own.<p>Disclaimer: I'm employee of Sumo Logic.