InfluxDB Time Series

InfluxDB is an open-source time series database created by Paul Dix and the InfluxData team in 2013, headquartered in San Francisco, providing high-performance storage, querying, and visualization of time-stamped data including metrics, events, logs, sensor data, and application telemetry, written in Go for performance and concurrency, with features including the Flux query language for data transformation and analysis, continuous queries for pre-aggregation, retention policies for data lifecycle management, downsampling for long-term storage efficiency, telegraf for data collection, chronograf for visualization, and kapacitor for alerting, designed to handle millions of data points per second with sub-second query latency, adopted by over two thousand companies including Tesla, Cisco, and Equinix for their monitoring and IoT data needs. The data model organizes time series data into measurements containing tagged key-value pairs and field values, with tags indexed for fast filtering, fields storing the actual metric values, and timestamps providing the temporal dimension, enabling efficient storage and retrieval of high-cardinality time series data through a time-structured merge tree storage engine that groups data by time intervals for fast range queries. The Flux query language provides a functional, pipe-oriented syntax for data transformation, with operations including filtering by tags and time ranges, aggregating through mean, sum, count, and percentile functions, grouping by tags and time windows, joining across measurements, and writing results back to the database, while the language also supports external data sources including SQL databases, HTTP APIs, and CSV files. The Telegraf agent collects metrics from over two hundred input plugins. The Chronograf dashboard. The Kapacitor alerting engine. The cloud and self-hosted options. The edge data replication. The SQL compatibility through Flight SQL. Designed by Paul Dix. Designed for DevOps and IoT teams.