Companies are constantly looking for ways to make solutions work better and smarter, accomplishing this by tracking the performance of each of the components underlying its solution.
All this critical performance data has a time stamp and a value - also known as time series data.
DBTA recently held a webinar with Anais Dotis-Georgiou, developer advocate at InfluxData, and Katy Farmer, DevRel at InfluxData, who discussed why companies should use a Time Series Database (TSDB) for your important Times Series Data and not a traditional datastore.
Time series data is a series of data points ordered in time, Dotis-Georgiou and Farmer explained. Characteristics of such data includes high volume, value increased by the timestamp, and its more valuable as a dataset than a single point.
Time series databases offer scalability, usability, and specialty capabilities. It can be used for forecasting, the Internet of Things, analytics, and devOps, Dotis-Georgiou and Farmer said.
Time Series databases specialize in higher writes with eventual consistency, even across distributed systems.
Interacting with time series data should be easy. Modular tools allow for customizable and specific architecture. Specialized query languages to interact w/data in the context of time.
InfluxData offers an open source project called Telegraf and InfluxDB. Telegraf offers features that include:
- Plugin-driven server agent for collecting & reporting metrics: “Push-Style”
- Used to batch metrics from multiple sources together in order to reduce thenumber of atomic write requests
- Large collection of Plugins:
- ? Inputs
- Outputs
- Aggregators
- Processors
- Can act as an:
- Agent
- Collector
- Ingest Pipeline
InfluxDB is a time-series database built from the ground up to handle high write and query loads. The platform provides a custom high performance data store written specifically for time-stamped data, (DevOps monitoring, application metrics, IoT sensor data, & real-time analytics). And it offers a SQL-like query language for interacting with data (InfluxQL).
An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.