Every enterprise collects and stores massive amounts of security and observability data but struggles to get value outside of operations and security teams. These datasets can offer enormous value to business operations and enterprise reporting teams if they have access to the data in their toolsets. BizOps needs to optimize batch planning and the enterprise reporting teams need to reconcile how many assets the enterprise owns versus the number it has under support contracts.
The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Army Research Laboratory (ARL) faces unique challenges in working with data to develop new technologies. It needs the ability to seamlessly analyze data both in the field and in the lab. Connectivity in the field can also be very unpredictable. Without a database that can handle intermittent connectivity, the systems become inefficient and waste time and money.
Time series databases like InfluxDB are databases that specialize in handling time series data, which is data that is indexed by time. Unlike traditional databases, time series databases are optimized for reading and writing data with less performance consideration for updating or deleting data. Due to the time-dependent nature of time series data, time series databases are handy for application monitoring.
Hulu, the entertainment streaming platform, needed a solution to scale up its internal application and infrastructure monitoring platform as it grew beyond 1 million metrics per second. The solution it created combines two open source tools— InfluxDB, a time series database, and Kafka, an event-streaming platform. It’s not just global enterprises like Hulu that have access to world-class tools and infrastructure to achieve their business goals.
A common debate in software development focuses on whether to use already-available tools or services, which offer better developer productivity, or stick with lower-level tools or custom-built solutions, which offer more control and potentially better performance and flexibility. This can be boiled down to the decision of whether to build or buy. These two approaches are at the root of many current tech industry ideological conflicts.