5G Test Network is a facility for R&D and testing in a realistic 5G network environment, and it is located on the premises of VTT and University of Oulu. Fully functioning, it will form a dynamic and heterogeneous platform for developing and testing new applications, services, algorithms, technologies and systems.

As a part of their DevOps monitoring strategy, it is important for 5G Test Network to support analytics, testing and development, and to do so by collecting metrics from various parts of the infrastructure, including the telco core backend, routers, IoT gateways, network application endpoints (QoS at IP level), host metrics (e.g., Telegraf), application-level customized metrics and test execution metrics. As one of the analytics tools/backends, InfluxDB is used as a data store on top of which they can use dashboards and visualizations to explore the data.

Key features that 5G Test Networks appreciates:

  • The flexibility that InfluxDB can take in different types of measurements, its diverse metadata (tags), and easy integration with existing visualization tools, e.g., Grafana and Chronograf.
  • Telegraf is a handy tool for host-based monitoring and is in the same ecosystem (InfluxDB platform)
  • Open source — free, good support, active and open development, and responsive forums
  • Promise of scalability

InfluxDB made time series easy for 5G Test Networks and enabled them to quickly and easily integrate visual exploration of diverse time series data into their process.