InfluxData Blog - Mark Herring

Using InfluxDB to Predict The Next Extinction Event

Mark Herring (InfluxData) — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 07:00:10 -0700

An alternative title could be “How to get JSON into InfluxDB Cloud 2.0” but that sounded too boring!

OK, maybe the title is a bit of a stretch goal, but I wanted to take my new InfluxDB Cloud account to ingest some real data (I chose Meteorites, hence the title), and see how quickly I could visualize the data. Full disclosure — I had not tried this before!

I have broken this blog post into two major sections:

Section 1: The time to awesome approach
Section 2: The step-by-step reality

Section 1: The time to awesome approach

Like one of those cooking shows, here are some ingredients…Tada here is the cake…

Step 1 – Find the data

I looked for some interesting data sets and settled on the Earth Meteorite Landings. Why? I wanted to predict the end of the world — what better way than a Meteorite takes out the earth. Hey maybe that should be a movie…Oh yeah, been there done that.

The data:

 {
  "name": "Aachen",
  "id": "1",
  "nametype": "Valid",
  "recclass": "L5",
  "mass": "21",
  "fall": "Fell",
  "year": "1880-01-01T00:00:00.000",
  "reclat": "50.775000",
  "reclong": "6.083330",
  "geolocation": {
  "type": "Point",
  "coordinates": [
6.08333,
50.775
  ]
    }
       },

Step 2 – Use Telegraf to parse the JSON

Next step — configure Telegraf to connect to the dataset and extract the interesting data. Here is a snippet of my Telegraf configuration file:

[[inputs.http]]
  interval = "10s"

  ## One or more URLs from which to read formatted metrics
  urls = [
    "https://data.nasa.gov/resource/y77d-th95.json"
  ]

  name_override = "meteorevent"

  tagexclude = ["url"]

  ## HTTP method
  method = "GET"
## Tag keys is an array of keys that should be added as tags.
      tag_keys = [
    "recclass"

  ]

  ## String fields is an array of keys that should be added as string fields.

  ## String fields is an array of keys that should be added as string fields.
  json_string_fields = [
      "fall",
    "name",
    "mass"]

  ## Name key is the key to use as the measurement name.
  json_name_key = ""

  ## Time key is the key containing the time that should be used to create the
  ## metric.
  json_time_key = "year"

  ## Time format is the time layout that should be used to interprete the json_time_key.
  ## The time must be `unix`, `unix_ms`, `unix_us`, `unix_ns`, or a time in the
  ## "reference time".  To define a different format, arrange the values from
  ## the "reference time" in the example to match the format you will be
  ## using.  For more information on the "reference time", visit
  ## https://golang.org/pkg/time/#Time.Format
  ##   ex: json_time_format = "Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 -0700 MST 2006"
  ##       json_time_format = "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00"
  ##       json_time_format = "01/02/2006 15:04:05"
  ##       json_time_format = "unix"
  ##       json_time_format = "unix_ms"

json_time_format = "2006-01-02T15:04:05.000"

  ## Timezone allows you to provide an override for timestamps that
  ## don't already include an offset
  ## e.g. 04/06/2016 12:41:45
  ##
  ## Default: "" which renders UTC
  ## Options are as follows:
  ##   1. Local               -- interpret based on machine localtime
  ##   2. "America/New_York"  -- Unix TZ values like those found in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
  ##   3. UTC                 -- or blank/unspecified, will return timestamp in UTC
  #json_timezone = ""

  [[processors.converter]]
  [processors.converter.fields]
   integer = ["mass"]

Step 3 – Use Telegraf to send the data to InfluxDB Cloud

Set your token, put in the organization and the bucket you want to land the data in:

[[outputs.influxdb_v2]]	
  ## The URLs of the InfluxDB cluster nodes.
  ##
  ## Multiple URLs can be specified for a single cluster, only ONE of the
  ## urls will be written to each interval.
  ## urls exp: http://127.0.0.1:9999
  urls = ["https://PUT IN YOUR URL.influxdata.com"]

  ## Token for authentication.
  token = "$INFLUX_TOKEN"

  ## Organization is the name of the organization you wish to write to; must exist.
  organization = "PUT IN YOUR ORGANIZATION"

  ## Destination bucket to write into.
  bucket = "Meteroite3"

Then just spin up telegraf:

telegraf --config mytelegraf.conf

Step 4 – Visualize the data

Log into InfluxDB Cloud, and build a query:

from(bucket: "Meteroite3")
  |> range(start: -100y)
  |> filter(fn: (r) => r._field == "mass")
  |> group()
  |> aggregateWindow(every: 1y, fn: count, createEmpty: false)

And show the results.

Wow, wasn’t that easy!

Section 2: The step-by-step reality

I decided to also tell you what my journey was really like. I am hoping that the journey will help others on their journey because the platform wasn’t as easy as I had read in that awesome marketing literature, but I know next time it will be much easier.

Step 0 – Create a Cloud 2.0 account

This was really simple: I signed up for InfluxDB Cloud, validated my email and logged in. I was inspired by Samantha Wang’s blog but wanted to use “my own” dataset. I chose the dataset as described above and was ready to go.

Step 1 – Configure Telegraf

Installing Telegraf was pretty easy, the Docs were pretty clear, and it was running in no time. Now all I needed to do was to configure it! Back to Cloud, to get the data from JSON.

Loved the “Load your data” visualization…But where was “Load from JSON”? Grrr.. back to the Docs, off to GitHub, and now I was getting deeper down the rabbit hole!

On GitHub, I read about the JSON Plugin Parser and created my first configuration file for Telegraf.

[[inputs.file]]
  files = ["example"]

  name_override = "meteorevent"

  tagexclude = ["url"]

  ## HTTP method
  method = "GET"
## Tag keys is an array of keys that should be added as tags.
      tag_keys = [
    "recclass"

  ]

  ## String fields is an array of keys that should be added as string fields.

  ## String fields is an array of keys that should be added as string fields.
  json_string_fields = [
      "fall",
    "name",
    "mass"]

  ## Name key is the key to use as the measurement name.
  json_name_key = ""

  ## Time key is the key containing the time that should be used to create the
  ## metric.
  json_time_key = "year"

  ## Time format is the time layout that should be used to interprete the json_time_key.
  ## The time must be `unix`, `unix_ms`, `unix_us`, `unix_ns`, or a time in the
  ## "reference time".  To define a different format, arrange the values from
  ## the "reference time" in the example to match the format you will be
  ## using.  For more information on the "reference time", visit
  ## https://golang.org/pkg/time/#Time.Format
  ##   ex: json_time_format = "Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 -0700 MST 2006"
  ##       json_time_format = "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00"
  ##       json_time_format = "01/02/2006 15:04:05"
  ##       json_time_format = "unix"
  ##       json_time_format = "unix_ms"

json_time_format = "2006-01-02T15:04:05.000"

  ## Timezone allows you to provide an override for timestamps that
  ## don't already include an offset
  ## e.g. 04/06/2016 12:41:45
  ##
  ## Default: "" which renders UTC
  ## Options are as follows:
  ##   1. Local               -- interpret based on machine localtime
  ##   2. "America/New_York"  -- Unix TZ values like those found in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones
  ##   3. UTC                 -- or blank/unspecified, will return timestamp in UTC
  #json_timezone = ""

Oh no, but I didn’t have a file — mine was a URL. I thought about “cheating”, but no, I wanted this to be a “real example” so I find out how to get data from a URL. Updated the top of my config file:

[[inputs.http]]
  interval = "10s"

  ## One or more URLs from which to read formatted metrics
  urls = [
    "https://data.nasa.gov/resource/y77d-th95.json"
  ]

Fantastic! Got data coming in (I hope). Oh, how do I tell it to go to my Cloud instance? Back to the Docs, where I found out about manually configuring Telegraf.

[[outputs.influxdb_v2]]
  urls = ["put in your URL"]
  token = "$INFLUX_TOKEN"
  organization = "orgname"
  bucket = "example-bucket"

Back to Cloud, created my bucket, created my token. OK, I was seriously ready.

Fire up telegraf:

telegraf --config mytelegraf.conf

And…

ERROR:
Error in plugin: [url=https://data.nasa.gov/resource/y77d-th95.json]: parsing time "1880-01-01T00:00:00.000" as "unix": cannot parse "1880-01-01T00:00:00.000" as "unix"

Ok so I knew that my

json_time_format = "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00"

was wrong, but what should it be? From the JSON, I could see it was:

"year": "1880-01-01T00:00:00.000",

But what to change json_time_format = "2006-01-02T15:04:05Z07:00" to be?

I think I tried everything…So I “phoned a friend”, David McKay, the exceptional DevRel who happens to be just a Slack message away. He comes back with:

json_time_format = "2006-01-02T15:04:05.000"

OK, I have no idea how he got that…Don’t see it in the Docs, but other than being amazed at how good he was, I was eager to continue…He also gave me one more bit of advice for my config file.

[[processors.converter]]
 [processors.converter.fields]
   integer = ["mass"]
   float = ["reclat", "reclong"]

I updated my config…let’s go!

Darn, another error:

[inputs.http]: Error in plugin: [url=https://data.nasa.gov/resource/y77d-th95.json]: JSON time key could not be found

Checked Cloud…No data! Grrrrrr.

OK, I was so close… What to do? I thought for a short second of giving up – nope I was not going to do that! It was time to “call another friend” – (side note, why not call David again? Well, I thought if I send my requests in parallel across the org, no one would understand how “needy” I was). But I am a sucker for punishment, so it is all revealed in this blog! Russ Savage to the rescue (Russ is the Director of Product Management at InfluxData). He found that in the JSON, there were a few entries with no year value. Another learning experience for me — if Telegraf finds an error in JSON, it just stops…Nothing is written!

So what to do? Ok I cheated…I copied the JSON file, removed the offending entries, saved it and went back to:

[[inputs.file]]
  files = ["mynewdata.JSON"]

Step 2 – Get data in...

Success…Telegraf got the data from JSON to Cloud 2.0. I then killed the telegraf process after 15 seconds. No need to run the same file again and again. Also got a few issues logged against Telegraf.

Step 3 – Visualize the data

This was almost the easiest part. I say “almost” because I first tried Data Explorer.

Newbie tip: Set time to be much longer than last hour! My data was old!

Changing that and wow…I have data!

What I did learn is that Data Explorer was good but maybe too smart for me.

from(bucket: "Meteroite3")
  |> range(start: v.timeRangeStart, stop: v.timeRangeStop)
  |> filter(fn: (r) => r._measurement == "file")
  |> filter(fn: (r) => r._field == "mass")
  |> aggregateWindow(every: v.windowPeriod, fn: sum)
  |> yield(name: "sum")

I simplified this script to:

from(bucket: "Meteroite3")
  |> range(start: -100y)
  |> filter(fn: (r) => r._field == "mass")
  |> group()
  |> aggregateWindow(every: 1y, fn: sum, createEmpty: false)

Step 4 – Predict the future!

Ok, so I decided to use Holt-Winters to predict the future:

from(bucket: "Meteroite3")
|> range(start: -100y, stop:-8y)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r._field == "mass")
|> group()
|> aggregateWindow(every: 1y, fn: count, createEmpty: false)
|> holtWinters(n: 10, seasonality: 0, interval: 1y, withFit: true)
|> yield(name:"prediction")

So it shows we will all live…Don’t worry!

I did speak to our ML expert, and this is what she said:

"In order to use Triple Exponential Smoothing (Holt-Winters) or Double Exponential Smoothing, your data needs to exhibit trend and seasonality or just trend, respectively. Your data doesn't have any clear seasonality or trend." – Anais Dotis-Georgiou

Thanks to everyone who helped me predict the next extinction event!

InfluxData opens InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 to public beta

Mark Herring (InfluxData) — Tue, 07 May 2019 07:00:04 -0700

New unified platform enables deeper data insights, more flexibility, faster onboarding and a rate-limited free tier

SAN FRANCISCO – May 7, 2019 – InfluxData, creator of time series database InfluxDB, today announced the public beta of InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 – the most significant evolution of the platform since the project started in 2013. With feedback from open source users and customers, InfluxData strengthened and streamlined the entire InfluxDB platform to improve the overall experience for developers and companies looking to handle and harvest deep insights from their time series datasets. InfluxData is inviting adventurous developers to join the beta and provide feedback that will help shape the future of InfluxDB Cloud.

“Understanding how data changes over time is critical to creating actionable insights that provide greater business value,” said Paul Dix, co-founder and CTO of InfluxData. “This makes time series the best abstraction for understanding data, which is the motivation behind our purpose-built platform. We hope the developer community will join us on this journey and join the InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 beta program.”

Major new features in InfluxDB Cloud 2.0, include:

Rate-limited FREE tier: Designed for getting started and the hobbyist, it is even faster to get started than downloading the open source product.
Deeper insights with new Flux language support: Flux is a powerful new scripting and query language – the first functional language built specifically for time series data. Now it is possible to do complex analytics and math across measurements.
Single, unified API: Everything in InfluxDB (ingest, query, storage, and visualization) is now accessible via a unified API, enabling seamless movement between open source and cloud.
Integrated visualization and dashboarding: The pioneering work of the Chronograf project is now part of InfluxDB; enabling enhanced onboarding and user experience without having to rely on additional installs.
Usage-based pricing: The new pricing model offers more flexibility and ensures that customers are only paying for what they need; it will automatically adjust for projects based on data needs.

InfluxData has more than 500 customers and over 200,000 servers running InfluxDB that span three primary use cases: DevOps monitoring, real-time analytics, and IoT monitoring. Any organization that has servers, VMs, containers, applications, sensors, users or events to track can benefit from using InfluxDB.

About InfluxData InfluxData is the creator of InfluxDB, the open source time series database. Our technology is purpose-built to handle the massive volumes of time-stamped data produced by IoT devices, applications, networks, containers and computers. We are on a mission to help developers and organizations, such as Cisco, IBM, PayPal, and Tesla, store and analyze real-time data, empowering them to build transformative monitoring, analytics, and IoT applications quicker and to scale. InfluxData is headquartered in San Francisco with a workforce distributed throughout the U.S. and across Europe. For more information, visit www.influxdata.com and follow us @InfluxDB.

InfluxData expands to Austin

Mark Herring (InfluxData) — Wed, 01 May 2019 07:00:55 -0700

New office will support growing team and operations to accelerate expansion and adoption of the time series database

SAN FRANCISCO – May 1, 2019 – InfluxData, creator of open source time series database InfluxDB, today announced the opening of a second office in downtown Austin. On the heels of a $60-million venture capital infusion, the new office is part of the company’s growth strategy to further expand operations in the U.S. and around the world. The company expects to nearly double the number of employees worldwide by the end of 2019.

“Our team is growing quickly to keep up with enterprise demands for time series data management,” said Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. “Hiring in tech has never been so competitive so we look for talented people wherever they are and have had tremendous success in Austin because it attracts smart, creative and driven people – the kind we’re looking for to join our team.”

InfluxData’s Austin office opening comes after another year of exceptional growth. With the explosion of DevOps (e.g., Kubernetes, microservices) and the Internet of Things (e.g., sensors), the adoption of time series databases has accelerated as enterprises demand better insights to achieve better results, and grow their customer base through effective processing and analysis of time series data. In 2018, InfluxData more than doubled its sales and headcount, reaching more than 500 customers for both DevOps and IoT functions – including Wayfair, Mulesoft, RingCentral, PayPal and Cisco.

“We’re following the footsteps of other successful companies growing out of Silicon Valley and opening operations in Austin,” said Lauren Partin, sales development manager and head of the Austin office. “We have a lot of space to grow and have already started expanding the team. We hope that the convenient location of our new, open and creative workspace will draw more people to join us.”

The InfluxData Austin office is located at 9020 North Capital of Texas Highway, Building 2, Suite 337 – near the Arboretum in North Austin. InfluxData has a distributed workforce, with staff throughout the U.S. and across Europe. The company is hiring for many positions in every department, and the Austin office is focused on recruiting sales development representatives, technical support engineers, and database engineers. All open positions are listed on www.influxdata.com/careers.

About InfluxData InfluxData is creator of InfluxDB, the open source time series platform. Built from the ground up, InfluxDB is optimized for analyzing metrics and events (time series data) for DevOps and IoT applications. Whether the data comes from humans, sensors, or machines, InfluxData empowers developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics, and IoT applications faster, easier, and to scale delivering real business value quickly. Based in San Francisco, InfluxData has more than 500 customers including Cisco, eBay, IBM and Siemens. For more information, visit www.influxdata.com. Twitter: @influxdb.

InfluxData and Google Cloud Partner to Offer Leading Time Series Database on Google Cloud Platform

Mark Herring (InfluxData) — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 09:00:53 -0700

New integrated solution emphasizes benefits of open source technologies and expands availability and distribution of InfluxDB to Google Cloud Platform

SAN FRANCISCO – April 9, 2019 – InfluxData, creator of the open source time series database InfluxDB, and Google Cloud today announced a partnership to integrate InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 with the Google Cloud Platform to offer a streamlined user experience. Google Cloud customers will have access to the new solution, InfluxDB Cloud on Google Cloud, directly on the Google Cloud Marketplace or through the Google enterprise sales team.

The explosion of DevOps (e.g., Kubernetes, microservices) and the Internet of Things (e.g., sensors) is motivating enterprises to look for ways to achieve better results, gain new insights and grow their customer bases through effective processing and analysis of time series data. IDC predicts that the global sum of data will grow to 175 zettabytes by 2025 and of that, 30 percent will be consumed in real time. As a result, time series databases are in high demand and this need will continue to grow. Through this partnership, Google Cloud customers will have easy access to the leading time series database to fit their organizations’ ever-growing needs.

“Bringing InfluxDB to Google Cloud was a natural choice for us given InfluxData’s proven history of customer-centric, open source innovation,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, Corporate Vice President, Global Partner Ecosystem at Google Cloud. “We’re committed to delivering best-in-class technology and services to our customers. Partnering with InfluxData and offering InfluxDB as a managed service on GCP will help us do this while continuing to foster a robust and customer-focused open source ecosystem.”

Google Cloud is partnering with top open source providers in several categories to bring the best of open source to its customer base. Customers will have the flexibility to develop with open source technology using the services from top partners integrated with GCP. This will include the ability to manage InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 from the Google Cloud console and have the same integrated billing, support and other deep product integrations with GCP.

“Google and InfluxData share a belief that the open source community fosters innovation and transparency that is unmatched by any proprietary product offering,” said Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. “Driven by increased instrumentation of the physical and software worlds, demand for time series is growing faster than any other database category. This close partnership amplifies our strategy to increase accessibility to InfluxDB and ultimately empower more developers with our time series solutions.”

Product Availability InfluxDB Cloud on Google Cloud will be available in late 2019 to companies using Google Cloud Platform. Get updates and learn more about InfluxData’s partnerships with Google.

About InfluxData InfluxData, creator of InfluxDB, delivers a modern open source platform, built from the ground up, for analyzing metrics and events (time series data) for DevOps and IoT applications. Whether the data comes from humans, sensors, or machines, InfluxData empowers developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics, and IoT applications faster, easier, and to scale delivering real business value quickly. Based in San Francisco, InfluxData has more than 500 customers including Cisco, eBay, IBM and Siemens. For more information, visit www.influxdata.com. Twitter: @influxdb.

InfluxData Secures $60 Million in Series D Funding to Bring the Value of Time Series to the Enterprise Mainstream

Mark Herring (InfluxData) — Wed, 13 Feb 2019 04:30:36 -0700

Norwest leads round, emphasizing strong growth and market potential; former MongoDB CEO joins board of directors

SAN FRANCISCO – InfluxData, creator of the leading time series database InfluxDB, has raised $60 million in Series D funding, led by Norwest Venture Partners and joined by Sorenson Capital and existing investors Sapphire Ventures, Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Trinity Ventures and Harmony Partners.

The proliferation of data continues to grow, prompted mainly by the instrumentation of the virtual (e.g., Kubernetes, microservices) and physical (e.g., IoT sensors) worlds. As enterprises look for ways to achieve better results, gain new insights and grow their customer base, analysis of time series data is critical and is driving the need for purpose-built solutions. InfluxDB is the leading time series database – which has been the fastest growing database category over the last two years, according to DB-Engines, the industry ranking authority. InfluxData more than doubled revenue, new customer logos, and employees in 2018 and is positioned to accelerate momentum through 2019 and beyond. To date, most of the company’s growth can be attributed to great product-market fit, a developer-focused approach and demand from the open source community.

“InfluxData’s time series vision is the future of data management,” said Rama Sekhar, partner at Norwest Venture Partners and new InfluxData board member. “Enterprises are experiencing a data revolution with massive increases in volumes of data. InfluxData is empowering enterprises to discover insights about their data by organizing it in the time dimension, a critical approach for use cases such as DevOps observability and IoT analytics. Developer support is also key in this space and the cult-following from the open source community signals a unique vision and value.”

The new infusion of funds will support further investment in product innovation, with increased focus on the cloud, and building out sales and marketing programs to meet growing product demand, as well as customer support needs. InfluxData will begin to market its solutions for specific uses, including industrial IoT and network monitoring, and target industries such as e-commerce, gaming and financial services.

“A majority of data is best understood in the time dimension, which is why time series data is the foundation of so many of today’s critical technology investments, including IoT, observability, machine learning and predictive analytics,” said Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. “The new funding will enhance our ability to deliver versatile solutions to countless companies looking to harvest insights from time and support our aggressive plans to scale the company. We’re also honored to have such esteemed individuals joining our board of directors to enhance our strategic direction.”

“InfluxData has demonstrated consistent growth in a market with tremendous potential, which is why we’re strengthening our commitment in this round of funding,” said Anders Ranum, managing director at Sapphire Ventures and member of the InfluxData board of directors. “The company continues to innovate its technology, pushing the boundaries when it comes to time series data solutions and is transforming its business model to support current and future demand. There are great things coming from InfluxData.”

InfluxData is also proud to welcome Max Schireson, entrepreneur in residence at Battery Ventures and former CEO of MongoDB, to its board of directors. Schireson brings a wealth of database industry experience, having led and advised cloud, big data and open source technology companies through hyper-growth transformational phases.

InfluxData closed $35 million in Series C funding in January 2018, led by Sapphire Ventures and joined by Harmony Partners and existing investors Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures. Other past investors include Bloomberg Beta and Y Combinator.

About InfluxData InfluxData, the creator of InfluxDB, delivers a modern open source platform, built from the ground up, for analyzing metrics and events (time series data) for DevOps and IoT applications. Whether the data comes from humans, sensors, or machines, InfluxData empowers developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics, and IoT applications faster, easier, and to scale delivering real business value quickly. Based in San Francisco, InfluxData has more than 450 customers including Cisco, eBay, IBM and Siemens. For more information, visit www.influxdata.com. Twitter: @influxdb.

About Norwest Venture Partners Norwest is a leading growth equity and venture investment firm managing more than $7.5 billion in capital. Since its inception, it has invested in more than 600 companies. The firm invests in early- to late-stage companies across a wide range of sectors with a focus on consumer, enterprise, and healthcare. It offers a deep network of connections, operating experience, and a wide range of impactful services to help CEOs and founders advance on their journey. Norwest has offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco, with subsidiaries in India and Israel. For more information, visit Norwest and follow on Twitter @NorwestVP.

InfluxData and VMware Collaborate to Optimize Streaming Data Collected from IoT Devices

Mark Herring (InfluxData) — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 07:00:48 -0700

InfluxDB Enterprise and Kapacitor to integrate with VMware Pulse IoT Center to manage time series data workloads at connected IoT edge

SAN FRANCISCO – InfluxData, creator of the modern open source purpose-built time series database InfluxDB, today announced its technology will integrate with VMware’s Pulse IoT Center, an IoT infrastructure management solution. The new solution embeds two products from InfluxData — InfluxDB Enterprise and Kapacitor — optimizing the handling of time series data from connected IoT devices, sensors and infrastructure running at the edge and using VMware Pulse IoT.

InfluxDB Enterprise is a database optimized for time series data. And Kapacitor is the real-time stream processing component of the InfluxData platform – used to analyze large quantities of sensor data in real time.

VMware Pulse IoT Center is a secure, enterprise-grade IoT device management and monitoring solution. It allows customers to onboard, manage, monitor and secure IoT systems and connected devices, bridge the gap between information technology and operational technology organizations, and simplify IoT device management with Pulse IoT Center.

The integration of InfluxDB and Kapacitor with VMware Pulse IoT Center creates a solution that enhances the ability of companies to handle the massive amounts of data associated with industrial and enterprise IoT workloads.

“IoT is a new frontier for the enterprise, and the ability to operate at the edge is non-negotiable,” said Mimi Spier, VP of Internet of Things Business at VMware. “Simply put, there must be edge computing to process data closer to where IoT devices reside, and real-time collecting, visualizing and processing of device metrics and time-series data to deliver insight and competitive advantage. We’re thrilled to collaborate with InfluxData in bringing edge computing capabilities to our mutual customers.”

“With highly capable platforms such as VMware Pulse IoT Center, quickly scaling out an IoT deployment is now easier than ever,” said Brian Mullen, VP of Business Development at InfluxData. “We are thrilled to be working with VMware to bring our open source platform, specifically InfluxDB Enterprise and Kapacitor, to industrial and enterprise IoT developers, enhancing their ability to handle time series data at the IoT edge.”

For more information on VMware Pulse IoT Center, visit www.vmware.com/products/pulse-iot-device-management.html.

For more information about InfluxData solutions, visit www.influxdata.com/products/editions.

2018: A Transformative Year for InfluxData

Mark Herring (InfluxData) — Thu, 31 Jan 2019 02:40:07 -0700

In 2018, InfluxData experienced the most accelerated growth in our company’s history. Every major sector of our business made progress well beyond initial goals. Expanding our category leadership, we empowered more developers to build next-generation applications aiding in real-time decision making for users.

It was a big year, and so, here we reflect on some of our 2018 accomplishments and the momentum that is propelling us into 2019.

	Secured $35 million in Series C financing led by Sapphire Ventures, and joined by Harmony Partners and existing investors Battery Ventures, Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures.
	Our talented and creative team is what makes this all happen. From engineering and sales to marketing and finance, every department contributes to our overall success. We're still hiring too. :)
	We maintained our leadership position wire-to-wire throughout the year among time series databases, according to DB Engines, and increased our overall database ranking by nearly 50%.
	Active open source instances grew from 115,000 to 192,000, a 67% increase.
	We continued to foster our open source community and surpassed 15k stars on Github.
	InfluxData sales doubled over 2018, as the team reached 450 customers for both DevOps and IoT functions – including big names like Wayfair, Mulesoft, RingCentral, PayPal, and Oracle.
	The engineering team was bustling this year, making significant strides in several areas of our products, from performance and data compaction and machine learning systems, to LDAP integration, and advanced analytics and self-healing.
	2019 will be another transformative year for InfluxData. We just celebrated the fifth anniversary of the InfluxDB project and we'll introduce the most significant product updates since the original launch, in the next several months – the solution has continued to evolve over the years, thanks in large part to our valued open source community.

Interest in time series data is at an all-time high, as companies recognize the structure of their most valued datasets. With this wind at our backs, we will push to reach more people and organizations to show them the real value, benefits and power of time series data collection and analysis, for real-time decision making.

And we’re already off to a great start. We just named two new executives – SVP of Engineering Jim Walsh and VP of Sales Will Paulus – whose experience and leadership will propel our technology and business forward to meet the very aggressive goals we have set for ourselves in 2019.

InfluxData Names New Engineering and Sales Executives to Accelerate Growth and Continue Time Series Database Category Leadership

Mark Herring (InfluxData) — Thu, 17 Jan 2019 06:00:45 -0700

Former Salesforce and Algolia leaders fill integral roles on company's executive team

SAN FRANCISCO – January 17, 2019 – InfluxData, creator of the modern open source purpose-built time series database InfluxDB, today announced Jim Walsh as its new Senior Vice President of Engineering and Will Paulus as its new Vice President of Sales. The addition of Walsh, former Senior Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering at Salesforce, and Paulus, former Head of U.S. Sales at Algolia, will propel the company’s plans for growth and expansion.

“Jim and Will each bring entrepreneurial initiative and a breadth of experience in their respective fields that will strengthen our senior leadership team,” said Evan Kaplan, CEO of InfluxData. “We experienced tremendous growth in 2018 and are well-positioned to continue this momentum through 2019. Appointing these accomplished executives in such pivotal roles at the company will support our overall push to innovate, expand and increase profitability.”

As SVP of Engineering, Walsh will focus on scaling the InfluxDB technology and introducing new features to expand DevOps and IoT functionalities, in addition to building and leading the engineering team. In his new role, Paulus will drive global customer acquisition and build out the team to support international sales operations.

“InfluxDB is an innovative open source platform with applications that span DevOps and IoT, areas with near-unlimited potential,” said Walsh. “InfluxData has an amazingly strong and talented group of engineers and I look forward to leading and further building out the team and keeping the technology on the cutting edge.”

“InfluxData has shown impressive and steady growth year over year and with industry-leading technology, it’s well-positioned to accelerate that growth,” said Paulus. “As more enterprises recognize the power of time series data, there’s a huge opportunity to further expand InfluxData’s market share to customers around the world.”

At Salesforce, Walsh led the company’s data platforms and services, and storage clouds, building and operating its reliable and highly scalable data storage and processing platforms. He established the company’s operations in Bellevue and drove its expansion from 110 to 500+ employees. Before Salesforce, he served in leadership roles at Microsoft, including co-founder of the Bing engineering team and founder of the Cosmos data platform, and was a founding member and VP of Engineering at Versive, a machine learning-based cybersecurity startup.

Before InfluxData, Paulus served as Head of U.S. Sales at Algolia, a search and discovery API provider. Company revenue quadrupled during the two years under his leadership. Previously, he led U.S. and international sales initiatives and built teams to support exponential growth for Google’s G Suite and Mixpanel, where revenue increased 10x in four years, establishing a firm footprint in the market.

InfluxData is the leader in time series databases, the fastest growing database category for the last two years, according to DB-Engines. As time-based data is generated at exponential rates from increased use of DevOps and IoT sensors, companies are requiring more advanced performance tools to analyze their complex environments. InfluxData has built a solid developer and customer base across industries – including manufacturing, financial services, energy, and telecommunications – by delivering a sophisticated open source platform that delivers real-time analytics for better business insights and real-time decision making.

StreamSets Embeds InfluxDB for Time Series Data Collection and Analysis for Multi-Pipeline Dataflows

Mark Herring (InfluxData) — Thu, 20 Dec 2018 04:55:50 -0700

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Dan Spalding, InfluxData 408-960-9297 | dan.spalding@influxdata.com

StreamSets Dataflow Performance Manager (DPM™) Now Ships with InfluxDB Embedded as Default Data Platform to Handle Time Series Workloads for Cloud-Native Data Movement

SAN FRANCISCO – Dec. 20, 2018 – InfluxData, the modern open source platform built specifically for metrics, events and other time series data that empowers developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics and IoT applications, today announced its inclusion in the StreamSets DataOps platform.

StreamSets customers adopting StreamSets Dataflow Performance Manager (DPM) have two options featuring the InfluxData platform for handling time series data within either open source InfluxDB or InfluxDB Enterprise for projects requiring clustering. StreamSets DPM offers advanced dataflow management, including Data SLAs for availability, accuracy and data privacy; as well as tracking of historical performance across data pipeline versions. Together, InfluxData and StreamSets present a unique offering for provisioning, testing, and scaling complex dataflows, with optimized handling of time series data, which is a key component in cloud-native application infrastructure workloads.

“As enterprises continuously deploy and scale out their cloud-native architectures, there is a geometric increase in the variety of data sources and the volume of data in motion,” said Harikiran Nayak, Director of Engineering at StreamSets. “StreamSets enables companies to efficiently develop and operate data movement across multi-platform hybrid infrastructures, yet remain agile in the face of change. In InfluxData, we have integrated a first-class system to handle this relentless, ever-growing stream of time series data in order to maximize performance for our DPM users.”

The companies have entered into an OEM partnership agreement, in which StreamSets will distribute InfluxData products in specific editions of its platform, sold to customers around the world.

“At InfluxData, our focus is twofold – building the highest performance time series platform in the world and minimizing developers’ Time to Awesome,” said Brian Mullen, VP of Business Development at InfluxData. “StreamSets is single-handedly defining the DataOps market for enterprise data integration. We are thrilled to be working with their world-class product team to serve this massive market opportunity, bringing simplicity and performance for time series data to StreamSets developers.”

Learn more about the StreamSets DataOps Platform at https://streamsets.com/products/dataops-platform.

About StreamSets StreamSets built the industry’s first multi-cloud DataOps platform for modern data integration, helping enterprises to continuously flow big, streaming and traditional data to their data scientists and data-intensive applications. It uniquely handles data drift, those frequent and unexpected changes to data that break pipelines and damage data integrity. The platform combines the open source StreamSets Data Collector™ for execution of any-to-any pipelines (the data plane) with cloud-native StreamSets Control Hub for the design, monitoring and performance management of multi-pipeline topologies (the control plane). For more information, visit www.streamsets.com.

About InfluxData InfluxData, the creator of InfluxDB, delivers a modern open source platform built from the ground up for analyzing metrics and events (time series data) for DevOps and IoT applications. Whether the data comes from humans, sensors, or machines, InfluxData empowers developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics, and IoT applications faster, easier, and to scale delivering real business value quickly. Based in San Francisco, InfluxData’s more than 450 customers include Cisco, eBay, IBM and Siemens. Visit www.influxdata.com. Twitter: @influxdb.

InfluxData, InfluxDB Cloud, InfluxDB, InfluxDB Enterprise, and Telegraf are all trademarked by InfluxData. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.