KYBURZ Switzerland AG is an international leader in mobility and transport solutions. It develops and produces high-quality electric vehicles for delivery companies, industrial companies, municipalities and private individuals. Over 23,000 KYBURZ vehicles are in use around the world; the best-known model, the KYBURZ DXP, is used as a delivery vehicle for the postal service and has now become a familiar sight on Swiss roads.

KYBURZ is using the combination of Telegraf and InfluxDB to collect time series data and monitor its entire infrastructure. This allows the company to react in a timely manner if anything goes wrong. The company uses the Telegraf statsd interface to interfere as little as possible with existing systems and monitor details of VMs’ health, the services’ health and processing performance. Additionally, KYBURZ uses InfluxDB for a quick overview of GPS data for their vehicle fleet.

The company likes InfluxDB because it integrates well with other tools, is open source, and is highly performant. Thanks to the many Telegraf plugins, it takes little effort to monitor any type of health checks for the company’s systems; it is even possible to monitor certificate expiration dates, which is an often-underestimated problem for KYBURZ. The performance of the monitoring system is crucial for the company, as they process a lot of data and do not want the monitoring system to become bottlenecked. For software architect Thorsten Reiss, using open source software is also extremely important.

KYBURZ found that InfluxDB is very easy to set up, runs on a variety of systems from Raspberry Pi to a large AWS instance. It is also very easy to maintain — the company’s system has been running for almost 3 years without issues (regular maintenance is really just the occasional update). The Telegraf plugins allow for easy integration with almost any existing system and allow for the monitoring of arbitrary indicators. InfluxDB is a well-designed software with an active community, and Reiss would recommend the entire software stack.

According to Reiss, thinking about and setting up proper retention rules is vital, especially if the disk space is limited. Also, he recommends not to expect standard SQL to work, as InfluxDB is a different type of database with a somewhat similar, but still distinct query language.