InfluxDB 1.0 GA Released: A Retrospective and What’s Next

While talking about InfluxDB people should not forget about their beta release of clustering to attract more users and then making it just enterprise. And no, it's not an argument that this is the only way to get paid in open source. Users should be careful while adopting InfluxDB as Influxdata does not clearly elaborate their plans on the product.

I've been using InfluxDB for almost a year now. At one point around 9 months ago I had given up on it because it was a bit crashy, and the database just was growing too fast. But the promise behind it was too compelling and I started experimenting with newer versions around 6 months ago and it has been just great! Much easier to deal with than Graphite/collectd/carbon, telegraf has not been eating our servers like collectd was, CPU usage is way down... Loving InfluxDB. Still need to implement annotations and SNMP polling in telegraf, but it is awesome. We are even pushing some application stats into it.

Influx is absolutely amazing. We&#x27;re using it along with grafana to store and display our desktop and web apps&#x27; analytics (it completely replaced GA), store and display HTTP health analytics (piping custom uwsgi request logger into UDP input), and do continuous analysis of Hearthstone games.<p>It&#x27;s incredibly fast and the grafana&#x2F;influx&#x2F;telegraf stack is really cool to play with. Highly recommended.

We are using influxDB to calculate SLO performance. Currently, among other things, we process about 30M ELB logs entries into influxdb per day; it handles this easily of course. Here are some musings for those interested based on 0.9:<p>Wins:<p>* The new storage engine is very, very cool. Would love to work on this thing. It&#x27;s fast and space efficient.<p>* Built in support for time bucketing GROUP&#x27;s<p>* Grafana integration is pretty good<p>* Writes come back after the data is stored; makes it easy to create durable, idempotent processing pipelines.<p>Woahs<p>* Unable to combine measurements in the same query; needs ETL with continuous queries or external tools<p>* No support for subqueries; more ETL<p>* Stream processing is a little lacking -&gt; can&#x27;t group on values and high cardinality tags make the DB explode; high cardinality is being worked on but IDK how high it will go, plus I mean the storage engine serves up streams of time-sorted data so samza that stuff up.<p>* Random crashes but the DB gets along fine when it comes back up<p>* Compactions use LOTS of RAM. Supposedly this can be tweaked and has been improved for 1.0<p>* Backfill queries with lots of points seem to use a crazy amount of RAM when bucketing on narrow time windows<p>Overall it&#x27;s chugging along quite well. Most of the query limitations we are able to solve with a combination of continuous queries and AWS lambda functions kicked off by CloudWatch Events.

I still don&#x27;t quite understand Chronograf: I know that you want to own the stack but are there any major advantages over Grafana?<p>Sorry if I&#x27;m being ignorant but I couldn&#x27;t find anything that would&#x27;ve made me think one way or another.

We&#x27;ve been using influx since 0.9 in production. Had a few bumps with cardinality growing out of control, but now working around those limits, it&#x27;s going well. Looking forward to that being something tackled with upcoming releases.

Great stuff. Congrats to everyone on the InfluxDB team on this big milestone.

A very happy InfluxDB user here, but did you really had to title your release email &quot;InfluxDB 1.0 GA is Here! Plus 27x Faster than MongoDB Benchmarks&quot;?

I played around with InfluxDB, Telegraf and Grafana a while ago, and it worked very nicely for the basic stuff I tried.<p>One thing in Telegraf where I didn&#x27;t figure out a good solution was a way to parse arbitrary log files and generate data points and&#x2F;or annotations from them.<p>There is a particularly annoying log file format from a proprietary application containing data I like to monitor which contains time series values in a multiline format as well as error messages. What I&#x27;d like to do is to have Telegraf tail the log file and pass it through a script that generates actual influxdb data from that. So something similar like the telegraf tail plugin, but with a data transformation in between.

&gt; We had been grappling with what we should do for most of August 2013 and had another idea that I planned to debut at Monitorama in Berlin in late September. The conference was all about monitoring and I thought it would be a good place to find a receptive audience for a new monitoring product.<p>What was it?

As per the article the issue influx tries to solve does so by trying to jam non-ts data into a ts database. You gain much more by simplifying things with say a constant increment mirror mmap file with another simple KV that maps offsets for tags and such. I would bet this would be immensely faster except for contrived update-tag-on-every-entry.

We evaluated InfluxDB 6 months ago and did not move forward because cluster mode was still in beta. Is there anyone running a cluster in production with some decent traffic?

Cool to see a database specializing in time series data.