InfluxData Blog - Nathan Haugo

Millisecond Level Precision Graphs with Chronograf v1.3.10.0

Nathan Haugo (InfluxData) — Fri, 27 Oct 2017 10:51:05 -0700

Today marks the latest release of Chronograf, the UI for the TICK Stack. Version 1.3.10.0 now supports millisecond-level precision when displaying and drilling down into query results through dashboards. Chronograf automatically adjusts the query’s ‘group by’ interval to sub-second values, and adjustments to our graphing libraries allow for finer-grained zoom than was available in previous versions. In a future release, we plan to add micro-second support for even greater precision.

Other highlights for this release include:

Downloading query results as a CSV file in a dashboard. Previously, this was only available in the data explorer.
Each dashboard cell can now have an independent time range.
Manual refresh button to trigger a dashboard refresh. Previously, the user would have to lower the dashboard's refresh interval and wait.

Chronograf 1.3.10.0 also contains a number of UI enhancements and bug fixes, and a full list of the changes can be found in the release notes.

The binaries can be found on our downloads page.

Coming Soon...

The team is continuing progress on Chronograf 1.4.0.0, which represents the first version to contain user-level permissions and organizations. In the meantime, we intend to add a Kapacitor log viewer to accompany the TICKscript editor, so users can easily view the output of Kapacitor to aid in creating and debugging of TICKscripts.

We’d love to hear your feedback! Engage with the community here.

Catching Up with Chronograf

Nathan Haugo (InfluxData) — Wed, 11 Oct 2017 04:00:09 -0700

Chronograf 1.3.9.0 is now available for download, and it provides a number of new features including an editor for TICKscript, support for the fill() functions, the ability to download queries as CSV files, and support for multiple data sources per dashboard. Now that Chronograf is almost a year old, let’s catch up on some of the features you might have missed - before we dig into the latest innovations.

Chronograf was first open sourced on November 15th, 2016

(though work on it started a bit earlier) and the first official beta release was December 6th. The goal of the project was to create a visual interface for the TICK Stack as well as to provide a solution for general DevOps problems. With this in mind, the initial beta of Chronograf consisted of three main components:

a list-based view into your infrastructure with pre-canned dashboards for 20+ Telegraf plugins,
a visual editor for creating basic Kapacitor alerting rules,
a simple InfluxDB schema explorer.

Chronograf flipped to 1.2.0-beta-x release numbering along with the rest of the TICK Stack last January. However, during this period Chronograf was in a transitional state, as work had begun on dashboards, but it did not yet have a visual editor for them. Over the next few months we worked towards what would end up being the Chronograf official GA release. The 1.3.0.0 release had full support for customizable dashboards, InfluxDB administration, feature parity with the now deprecated InfluxDB admin UI, and support for features available only within InfluxDB Enterprise.

The next major milestone for Chronograf was its inclusion

along with Kapacitor as part of InfluxDB Cloud subscriptions. For this milestone we improved the initial landing page, which provides information about Kapacitor alerts as well as a configurable news feed and getting started documentation. We also added auto selection of “group by time”, a number of new OAuth providers, customizable time ranges, security via JWT support with InfluxDB, and a large number of graph customizations.

The 1.3.9.0 release includes some of the most requested features by the community. First is the ability to export query results to CSV files so users can import their data and customize their graphs via Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. Currently this feature is only available from within the Data Explorer, but it will soon be an option for all cells in a dashboard. The next major feature is the ability to specify the data source for each cell in a dashboard. This allows users to create dashboards that link to more than one instance of InfluxDB, which is useful to compare results from multiple data centers, check production versus development environments, or visualize the data in a single dashboard gathered across separate departments and multiple instances of InfluxDB. Chronograf now also supports InfluxDB fill() functions and continues to move closer to full support of all InfluxQL functionality.

Perhaps the biggest feature introduced in this release of

Chronograf is the TICKscript editor. Previously, Chronograf provided a “wizard-based” approach for users that created basic TICKscripts that checked a metric against a particular threshold, against a relative change in value, or if the metric had stopped reporting stats (aka deadman alert). This was a great way for users to explore the basic functionality of Kapacitor, but it also meant that they would have to manage TICKscripts in multiple places and load them into Kapacitor via the Kapacitor CLI, API or through Chronograf. Now all TICKscripts are viewable and editable directly from within Chronograf. This feature also allows users to manage both batch and stream processing scripts in the UI. With this initial release of the TICKscript editor, users can get started with basic scripts using the visual rule builder and then expand on that functionality with access to all the features that Kapacitor has to offer.

So what is coming up for Chronograf? To complement the TICKscript editor, access to log information via the log API in Kapacitor 1.4.0 will be integrated into the overall experience. This has been a much-requested feature from our InfluxDB Cloud customers and will further streamline the development process for TICKscript. Over the next few

releases, we also intend to roll out time-based comparison allowing users to compare things like month-over-month performance of a given query, sub-second drill down and basic graph annotation support. We then plan to turn our full attention to our 1.4.0.0 release, planned for later this quarter, which will support user-level permissions and organizations. Also within the 1.4.0.x line, we are looking at building a new user experience which supports visualization for OpenTracing data, which we recently added to Telegraf.

If you have any thoughts on these features, suggestions for additional ones, or have bug reports, we are always happy to hear from our users on GitHub or answer any questions you have on our community portal.

Beta3 of Chronograf

Nathan Haugo (InfluxData) — Mon, 19 Dec 2016 04:00:26 -0700

As promised, we released an update to the Chronograf beta that includes bug fixes and some updates to the remaining features. In particular, we have added the ability to create your own queries outside of the query builder. This is useful if you want to build queries in time intervals outside of the standard set or if you prefer to type in your queries manually.

There were also a few improvements to the UI that were added. In particular,

Ability to distinguish queries in Data Explorer
Measurement name and field key were added to the query tab in the Data Explorer
Color coded the Kapacitor alert levels

Quickly know which queries are tied to which series

This release also includes a couple of bug fixes:

Ability to select text in a text box
Added version information in the nightly builds
Added the ability to restore defaults in the Kapacitor setup

You can read the details of all the changes in the latest change log and in the readme.

We will continue to be moving quickly so we hope you’ll contribute through feedback or code. We hope you enjoy exploring this update to the Chronograf Beta!

What's next

Chronograf Getting Started
Downloads for the TICK-stack are live on our "downloads" page
Chronograf Video
Chronograf Alpha Release Blog
Deploy on the Cloud: Get started with a FREE trial of InfluxDB Cloud featuring fully-managed clusters, Kapacitor and Grafana.
Deploy on Your Servers: Want to run InfluxDB clusters on your servers? Try a FREE 14-day trial of InfluxDB Enterprise featuring an intuitive UI for deploying, monitoring and rebalancing clusters, plus managing backups and restores.

Kubernetes Cluster Monitoring and Autoscaling With Telegraf and Kapacitor

Nathan Haugo (InfluxData) — Tue, 08 Nov 2016 08:00:30 -0700

With the 1.1 release of Telegraf and Kapacitor, InfluxData is improving the ease of use, depth of metrics and level of control we provide in maintaining and monitoring a Kubernetes cluster. InfluxDB has been a part of Kubernetes’ monitoring since v0.4 when the first version of Heapster was released and InfluxDB remains the default data sink.

Over the past two years we have worked with our users to get the most out of their Kubernetes monitoring setups. Unfortunately, Heapster’s output was never tuned particularly well to make the most efficient use of InfluxDB’s storage backend, forcing some of our users to experience more resource utilization from the data store than they would expect. Meanwhile much of the new development in Kubernetes metrics and monitoring does not natively integrate with Heapster. So, we have reached out to the community to rethink how Kubernetes cluster data is being collected and stored. In the process, we found a couple of common themes: first, no one seems committed to the long term future of Heapster; second, people are split on the push vs pull model of gathering metrics and the InfluxData philosophy is to provide support for both; third, since there are no current standards for the central distribution of Kubernetes metrics, users were forced to go to multiple sources and more often than not, had an incomplete view of their data. Finally, almost everyone wanted the ability to trigger the horizontal pod autoscaler using metrics other than those that are currently provided.

Telegraf

To ensure that we were gathering the richest set of metrics possible, we spent time with a number of current Kubernetes community members including the monitoring team at Deis. Their pre-configured monitoring solution for the Deis Workflow requires additional Kubernetes metrics that are provided by Heapster. That and the fact that they were already users of Telegraf and InfluxDB inspired them to create an input plugin. They were kind enough to contribute that input plugin which gathers metrics from the Kubernetes /stats/summary API endpoint. This plugin, along with the Prometheus plugin pointed at kube state metrics, provides Telegraf with a wide range of Kubernetes metrics. Running Telegraf as part of the daemonset lets users receive push-style metrics delivery while getting many of the same benefits provided by pull-style metrics. The data collection from Telegraf combined with Heapster provides InfluxDB users with access to key metrics for Kubernetes internals.

Kapacitor

The most common request we have heard from the community was the desire to easily scale their Kubernetes cluster with more flexibility than is provided by the horizontal pod autoscaler. Kapacitor 1.1 provides an easy path to resize your replica sets, deployments and replication controllers using any data stored in InfluxDB. We added Kubernetes replica set sizing logic into our flexible data processing framework, thus allowing Kapacitor to consider additional metrics when scaling pods up or down. For example, you can scale application servers based on page requests, or processing pods based on queue depth.

We have created an example of using Kapacitor to resize an application replica set . Please try it out and let us know what you think - we are always interested in the community’s feedback or code contributions.

What's next

Downloads for the TICK-stack are live on our "downloads" page
Deploy on the Cloud: Get started with a FREE trial of InfluxDB Cloud featuring fully-managed clusters, Kapacitor and Grafana.
Deploy on Your Servers: Want to run InfluxDB clusters on your servers? Try a FREE 14-day trial of InfluxDB Enterprise featuring an intuitive UI for deploying, monitoring and rebalancing clusters, plus managing backups and restores.
Tell Your Story: Over 100 companies have shared their story on how InfluxDB is helping them succeed. Submit your testimonial and get a limited edition hoodie as a thank you.