InfluxDB is perhaps the most popular Time Series databases out there.

It is maintained by influxdata who also provide a whole hosted service with the database, metrics collection, dashboards, and scripting (flux).

Main operations

The main operations we can do with influxDB on data:

  • Collect
  • Write
  • Process
  • Visualize
  • Monitor

Download

https://portal.influxdata.com/downloads/

  • Select the latest version
  • Follow the instructions either for the docker file or for your OS.

Installation

  • Follow the installation instructions for the open source version (OSS)
  • Run it with influxd from the terminal.
  • You can set up influxDB either by opening http://localhost:8086 in your browser, or by running influx setup in the terminal.

There go through the setup instructions. If you want also set up the influx CLI.

The line protocol

You can write data into InfluxDB in a line protocol format. Its specifications:

  • One line is one data point
  • Dimensions:
    • measurement
    • field set
    • tag set
    • timestamp

A few example lines (from the official tutorial)

mem,host=host1 used_percent=23.43234543 1556892576842902000
cpu,host=host1 usage_user=3.8234,usage_system=4.23874 1556892726597397000
mem,host=host1 used_percent=21.83599203 1556892777007291000

Scraping

InfluxDB can scrape data in the prometheus data format.