Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

March 2023

Cleaning and Interpreting Time Series Metrics with InfluxDB

A look at how to use Flux for data cleansing and analytics through the browser and via Visual Studio. Time series data is data you want to analyze and monitor over time. For example, you might want to know the water levels over the course of the day for a plant, or how much sunlight it receives and when. This is a simple but easy-to-understand example. Obviously on a larger scale the stakes can be higher.

InfluxDB, Flight SQL, Pandas, and Jupyter Notebooks Tutorial

InfluxDB Cloud, powered by IOx, is a versatile time series database built on top of the Apache ecosystem. You can query InfluxDB Cloud with the Apache Arrow Flight SQL interface, which provides SQL support for working with time series data. In this tutorial, we will walk through the process of querying InfluxDB Cloud with Flight SQL, using Pandas and Jupyter Notebooks to explore and analyze the resulting data, and creating interactive plots and visualizations.

Upgrade Your IoT/OT Tech Stack: Replace Legacy Data Historians with InfluxDB

Manufacturing and industrial organizations are firmly in the era of Industry 4.0. The third wave of industrial revolution, which saw the introduction of computers, robots, and automation in industrial processes, has given way to instrumentation, and the use of advanced technologies, like machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), using both raw and trained data, to enhance industrial processes.

Compactor: A Hidden Engine of Database Performance

This article was originally published in InfoWorld and is reposted here with permission. The compactor handles critical post-ingestion and pre-query workloads in the background on a separate server, enabling low latency for data ingestion and high performance for queries. The demand for high volumes of data has increased the need for databases that can handle both data ingestion and querying with the lowest possible latency (aka high performance).

Predictive Maintenance for Industrial IoT Devices at the Edge

In industrial operations, time is money. The more efficient processes and machinery are, the better it is for business. Providing proactive monitoring and maintenance of industrial machines, however, is not an easy task. This is especially true as these machines become increasingly complex and distributed. It’s not possible to have maintenance crews on site for every asset in a distributed system. The edge is where the physical world meets the digital world.

InfluxData Achieves ISO 27001 Certification

SAN FRANCISCO – March 21, 2023 – InfluxData, creator of the leading time series platform InfluxDB, today announced it has received the ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification, a globally recognized standard for Information Security Management Systems (ISMS). The certificate scope comprises the ISMS supporting the operations underlying the InfluxDB database cloud and enterprise offerings. It also includes ISO/IEC 27018:2019 compliance for the protection of personally identifiable information.

How to Get the Current Date and Time in SQL

SQL databases have several functions that reduce the complexity of working with date and time. Using these functions and a date and time type column, you can depend on SQL for the logic to write and read data with date and time. In this post, you’ll learn how to use the SQL date and time functions to get the current date and time.

IoT Sensors: What They Are and How to Use Them

For a very long time, businesses in various industries have been using smart sensors. However, with the development of the Internet of Things (IoT), their significance has increased. Sensors represent the beginning of a data collection chain that, when processed by IoT platforms, generates essential insights for assertive decision-making and even for developing new business ideas. Generally, a smart sensor has three main components: This technology is already used in many countries.

Time Series Data, Cardinality, and InfluxDB

In the world of databases, cardinality refers to the number of unique sets of data stored in a database. If we drill down a little further, we can think of cardinality as the total number of unique values possible within a table column or database equivalent. When thinking about time series data, we can ask some specific questions about cardinality. What does cardinality look like in practice? When does cardinality become a problem? How do we prevent cardinality issues?

Using Deduplication for Eventually Consistent Transactions

Deduplication is an effective alternative to transactions for eventually consistent use cases of a distributed database. Here’s why. Building a distributed database is complicated and needs to consider many factors. Previously, I discussed two important techniques, sharding and partitioning, for gaining greater throughput and performance from databases.

Data Modeling: Part 2 - Method for Time Series Databases

Time-varying entities may contain multiple time-varying and static attributes, making mapping them a particular challenge. Time is notorious in modeling tasks. Indeed, the temporal aspect exacerbates the complexity of the modeling task, making simple diagrams look pretty complex. The temporal dimension becomes particularly nasty when it takes part in identifying entities. The figure on the right visualizes the typical database example.

Why InfluxDB Cloud, Powered by IOx is a Big Deal to Me

From time to time throughout my career, I have been involved in projects with dramatic releases when we built and delivered something very new and very special. The release of InfluxDB Cloud, powered by IOx (referred to as “InfluxDB IOx” for short below) absolutely meets those criteria. I want to explain my personal views of why this release is so impactful and why I am so excited to be part of it.

Data Modeling: Part 1 - Goals and Methodology

In different techniques, entities and relationships remain central. However, their nature and roles are reinterpreted according to the business goals. Data modeling is the process of defining and representing the data elements in a system in order to communicate connections between data points and structures. In his impactful book “Designing Data-Intensive Applications,” Martin Kleppmann describes data modeling as the most critical step in developing any information system.

4 Unique Time Series Workloads for InfluxDB, Powered by IOx

Data is kind of like Newton’s first law of motion. Data is just that unless acted upon by something else. Time series data, therefore, is something you derive from data. We generally derive time series data to record historical observations about a physical or virtual system (for example, think of sensors and servers, respectively). However, not all time series data is the same. There are different use cases for time series data, and each has its own workload needs.

Webinar Highlight: Introducing InfluxDB's New Time Series Database Engine

As part of the InfluxDB Cloud, powered by IOx launch, Paul Dix and Balaji Palani provided an InfluxDB Cloud overview and demo. In case you missed it, this blog is a quick 5 minute read summarizing the webinar. We shared the recording and the slides from the presentation for everyone to review and watch at your leisure.