Resource Roundup: Getting Started with InfluxDB Cloud on Google Cloud

By Emily Kurze / Use Cases, Product, Developer, Company
Mar 26, 2021

Are you looking to get started with InfluxDB on Google Cloud? We’ve pulled together our top resources to help you get the most out of your time series data whether that’s coming from your Google Cloud infrastructure or your own application.

Read how customers like Wayfair and Vera C. Rubin Observatory use InfluxDB on Google Cloud to solve their time series data collection and processing challenges to power their multifaceted, complex real-world use cases.

Advantages of using InfluxDB on Google Cloud

InfluxDB on Google Cloud is built to handle the relentless scale of time-stamped metrics and events generated by modern microservices, devices, and sensors — something that general-purpose databases can’t do. InfluxDB Cloud is purpose-built for:

• Full observability — Telegraf's 200+ plugin-driven data collection plugins combined with InfluxDB's high ingestion capabilities mean that you can accumulate your data in one place. Get deeper insights into your time series data by pairing with AI and ML tooling like Google Cloud AI Platform's AI and machine learning services (TensorFlow, TPUs, TFX).
• Powerful querying — Every dashboard and every check in InfluxDB Cloud has a Flux script behind it that can have multiple queries, joins across data sources, variables, comparisons, regular expressions, and statistical functions. This results in unlimited flexibility to finetune your monitoring to your needs.
• Rapid deployment — InfluxDB Templates are packaged configurations and dashboards that contain everything you need to deploy monitoring solutions for dozens of technologies in minutes. Once you've installed the template, you can easily customize to your use case.
• Seamless billing — Getting InfluxDB Cloud on the Google Cloud Marketplace allows you to consolidate any InfluxDB charges into your monthly Google Cloud bill and use any contracted commitments.

Powerful insights from a wide array of use cases

InfluxDB Cloud on Google Cloud simplifies time series data ingestion, integration, and low-latency processing on Google Cloud for a wide range of use cases and industries including IoT, application and infrastructure monitoring for manufacturing, software, telecommunications, finance and more.

Using InfluxDB on Google Cloud for IoT use cases

Many Google Cloud customers have IoT event processing and time-based processing use cases, which require a high-performance time series database like InfluxDB; to collect, process, analyze and archive events from IoT devices, vehicles and smart systems. InfluxDB easily connects to Google Cloud services like BigQuery, Cloud IoT Core, and Cloud Machine Learning Engine. Learn more, in the IoT Event Processing and Analytics with InfluxDB in Google Cloud tech paper, and its companion webinar, to discover how Google Cloud incorporates InfluxDB as the time series component within its IoT event processing and analytics solution.

Using InfluxDB on Google Cloud for DevOps use cases

You can get a comprehensive view across your entire Google Cloud environment, containers, applications and microservices with the help of these InfluxDB Templates:

• Google Cloud Monitoring — is a templated solution that provides real-time visibility into the performance, uptime, and overall health of your Google Cloud-powered applications. Learn how to unify and analyze metrics from your services and applications by reading the tech paper, watching the webinar or get started with this easy tutorial.
• Kubernetes Monitoring — ensures that clusters utilize underlying resources efficiently. It also requires active management and continuous optimization based on historical data. This template includes two Kubernetes dashboards: Kubernetes Node Metrics and Kubernetes Inventory to help give you insight into your clusters.
• Kafka Monitoring — this template helps you manage your cluster, monitor system health in easy-to-use dashboards, get automated alerts and triggers, and more — all via a mechanism that puts all critical information front and center so that you can act on it as quickly as possible.

InfluxDB integrations with Google services and products

InfluxDB has native support for Google Cloud applications and services through integrations with the open source plugin-driven server agent, Telegraf. Using Telegraf, you can easily collect metrics, health status, state, statistics, event data and build dashboards for resources, services and KPIs, including:

• Stackdriver Input Plugin collects metrics, events and metadata from 40 different Google Cloud services and stores them in InfluxDB for dashboarding and analysis. Stackdriver Output Plugin outputs data to Stackdriver.
• Kubernetes Input Plugin can be used for Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) monitoring. Telegraf's Kube Inventory plugin generates metrics derived from the state of Kubernetes resources. Prometheus plugin gathers data from applications and services exposing metrics in Prometheus format.
• Google Cloud PubSub Plugin and PubSub Push Plugin allow you to pull and push messages from Pub/Sub into InfluxDB, and Telegraf's Cloud PubSub Output Plugin allows you to send data from InfluxDB to Google Cloud PubSub. From there, you can send data to BigQuery and to the Google AI platform.
• Docker Plugin and Docker Log Plugin can monitor containers used by Google Cloud Build.
• MQTT Input Plugin can consume MQTT topics or output data.
• Google Data Studio integration has a native connector in the InfluxData platform that allows users to query time series data from their InfluxDB instance to build Data Studio dashboards. Read the tutorial on how to access time series data in InfluxDB Cloud with Google Data Studio.
• Telegraf can monitor virtual machines spun up by Google Compute Engine, using its system monitoring plugins or any of the many plugins for monitoring resources and the applications running on those virtual machines.
• Users of either open source Kubernetes or Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) can deploy InfluxDB and handle operational tasks automatically using the InfluxData Kubernetes Service Operator (a Kubernetes operator to manage InfluxDB instances).

<figcaption> InfluxDB integrates with Google Cloud through native support and plugins.</figcaption>

Get InfluxDB Cloud for Google Cloud

The availability of InfluxDB Cloud on Google Cloud Marketplace means you can get one-click access to the industry’s leading time series platform for the collection, storage, analysis and visualization of metrics and events for real-time decision making. You can even use your Google Cloud credits toward to offset any InfluxDB costs.

Get started today with InfluxDB Cloud from InfluxData today for free to help you and your team to innovate faster and gain a competitive edge.