InfluxDB¶
Deprecated
Aiven has informed us that they will discontinue support for InfluxDB. The timeline is yet to be confirmed and we recommend that teams using InfluxDB today find other alternatives. For many teams BigQuery will be a good alternative.
Suggested alternative¶
Team Digihot has spent some time piloting a concept that uses BigQuery and Metabase as a replacement for InfluxDB and Grafana. They are very satisfied with the solution, and we have concluded that this is a viable replacement going forward. In their case, all applications that sent data to InfluxDB also used Kafka, so their solution is based around Kafka. Depending on the situation and use case, it would also be possible to send data to BigQuery directly from the applications.
Once the data is in BigQuery, you can use Metabase to create dashboards or dataproducts.
graph LR
accTitle: From Kafka to Metabase via BigQuery
accDescr: The diagram shows how the data is sent from the producer to Metabase. Producers on a kafka client, uses a kafka rapid, sending it to BigQuery sink ruler (BigQuery client) and BigQuery, that can be read from Metabase. Non-kafka apps can send data directly to BigQuery.
P1[Producer 1<br><small>Kafka Client</small>] --> K
P2[Producer 2<br><small>Kafka Client</small>] --> K
K[Kafka Rapid] --> BQSR
BQSR[BigQuery sink river<br><small>BigQuery Client</small>] --> BQ
E[Non-Kafka App<br><small>BigQuery Client<small>] --> BQ
BQ[BigQuery] --> M[Metabase]Reference documentation for existing instances of InfluxDB¶
Username and password¶
For now we are manually distributing the username and password for each instance. There is only one user for Influxdb. Contact us in #pig-aiven to get your credentials.
Default database name¶
The default database name is defaultdb.
Retention policies¶
The default database is created with a default retention policy of 30 days. You might want to adjust this by e.g. creating a new default retention policy with 1 year retention:
Datasource in grafana.adeo.no¶
Let us know in #pig-aiven if you want your Influxdb to be exposed at grafana.adeo.no. This means that everyone can access your data.
Access from Nais-app¶
If you need access from an application, you need to specify Inluxdb instance. See nais.yaml-reference.
Loading CA-certificate¶
Your application will also need an CA-certificate for your app to be able to connect to Aiven with SSL. The certificate will be loaded into your pod as an environment variable if you define a .spec.kafka.pool in your nais.yaml file.
Access from laptop¶
With Naisdevice you have access to the aiven-prod gateway. This is a JITA (just in time access) gateway, so you need to describe why, but the access is automatically given.
influx -username avnadmin -password foo -host influx-instancename-nav-dev.aivencloud.com -port 26482 -ssl
PS: Remember to use Influxdb CLI pre v2. For example v1.8.3.
Support¶
We do not offer support on Influxdb as software, but questions about Aiven and provisioning can be directed to #pig_aiven on Slack.
Created: 2021-02-22