About InfluxDB

Learning the basics of InfluxDB and running a demo with Docker.

Notes

These notes were originally made using InfluxDb v2 alpha. Currently updated for InfluxDb v2 beta.

There are major changes in commands/usage from 1.x, and of course the details below may change.

See Using InfluxDb with Ruby for an example of using InfluxDB 1.7 with docker.

Architectural Components

Compontent	Purpose
InfluxDB	Time-Series Data Storage
Telegraf	Time-Series Data Collector
Chronograf	Time-Series Data Visualization
Kapacitor	Time-Series Data Processing

Running With Docker

InfluxDB Docker Control

The influx_control.sh script is a simple wrapper for the main operations:

Startup:

$ ./influx_control.sh start
Stopping/removing any previous docker container..
Error response from daemon: No such container: myinfluxdb
Error: No such container: myinfluxdb
Starting  container with web access on port 9999..
594b4dfbc7401afc4d7626b97e4c0b1e888b077e9b1a3e5318209b81fe4cee2e

Shutdown:

$ ./influx_control.sh stop
Stopping/removing any previous docker container..
myinfluxdb
myinfluxdb

These start a docker image with admin console available on localhost:9999. It maps the database storage to myinfluxdb/data on the local filesystem.

Hitting localhost:9999 for the first time will prompt for the creationg of a user, organisation and bucket. For a first test, I used:

admin/password
org: lck
bucket: demo1

Writing Data

InfluxDB supports the following methods:

User Interface - manual data entry using the line protocol
influx CLI - using the influx write command
InfluxDB API - an HTTP request to the InfluxDB API /write endpoint

Creating a Token

From the Load Data > Tokens menu:

create_token

Writing Some Data with Curl

Posting some data using the token created in the pervious step:

curl -XPOST "http://localhost:9999/api/v2/write?org=lck&bucket=demo1&precision=s" \
  --header "Authorization: Token s1-6tIH6IWHbfWTeW3C0deVr1ZXivAjQFXdpwdUzCgmLemMX_K26fae6ziA5S6ooAHJokEHlcz1ZCb5c91sl0A==" \
  --data-raw "mem,host=host1 used_percent=23.43234543 1577674077"
curl -XPOST "http://localhost:9999/api/v2/write?org=lck&bucket=demo1&precision=s" \
  --header "Authorization: Token s1-6tIH6IWHbfWTeW3C0deVr1ZXivAjQFXdpwdUzCgmLemMX_K26fae6ziA5S6ooAHJokEHlcz1ZCb5c91sl0A==" \
  --data-raw "mem,host=host1 used_percent=33.43234543 1577675077"
curl -XPOST "http://localhost:9999/api/v2/write?org=lck&bucket=demo1&precision=s" \
  --header "Authorization: Token s1-6tIH6IWHbfWTeW3C0deVr1ZXivAjQFXdpwdUzCgmLemMX_K26fae6ziA5S6ooAHJokEHlcz1ZCb5c91sl0A==" \
  --data-raw "mem,host=host1 used_percent=35.43234543 1577676077"

These are three samples with second-level precision. Measurement=mem, field=user_percent with a host filter. The Data Explorer can be used to example the loaded data:

data_explorer

Project Notes