InfluxDB

What do you like best?

InfluxDB is a simple but very powerful time-series database that is lightweight and can be used at any scale. This database can be easily mapped to Grafana a data visualization tool to display different types of analytics. I love how powerful Influx DB is compared to its competitors. The performance we were observing when running on low-cost cloud compute instances was second to none. For me, it was an overall smooth conversion and I am very satisfied with the overall experience. I did not encounter any major roadblocks during the implementation process.

What do you dislike?

Nothing major to dislike about InfluxDB. It would be better if it has its own GUI to manage the database instead of using Linux based commands. Also, I wish it has some default graphical data visualization tool for analyzing and tuning the time-series data preparation. It has a simple UI to do some very basic operation but it would be awesome to have nice management GUI and I believe it is required to make this powerful DB more popular.

Another thing I've noticed a few times in 4 years of extensive usage is that the CPU usage went high to 100% for an unlimited time. Restarting the node is the only option I found.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

If you are doing time-series without InfluxDB, you are doing it wrong. I'm saying this because InfluxDB is built for solving problems related to time-series. Most of the other available options in the market are not purely built as time-series databases primarily.

This database can be easily mapped to Grafana a data visualization tool to display different types of analytics. Trust me, it's very easy to get started with InfluxDB. And the ROI is very good over time. You just need to focus and update your thoughts that are aligned to time-series architecture, a little bit different from traditional RDBMS or NoSQL.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

I use InfluxDB to monitor various types of matrics of VMs, containers, services, web servers, networks and so on. This time-series DB helps me to track different types of events and event-based alerts. Using the Kapacitor of TICK stack it is very easy to monitor data real-time and generate alarms accordingly. We also track different types of user events on a timely basis. InfluxDB directly supports TICK script that helps to identify anomalies in the network of the datacenter.