InfluxDB Getting Started

This repository contains a Docker Compose setup to quickly get started with InfluxDB 2 and Telegraf for monitoring internet speed and memory usage.

Prerequisites

Make sure you have Docker and Docker Compose installed on your system.

• Docker
• Docker Compose

Setup

1. Clone this repository.

2. Create an .env file based on the provided example.env:

   cp example.env influxv2.env

3. Modify the influxv2.env file to set your desired configuration.

4. Start the services using Docker Compose:

   docker-compose up -d

Configuration

• influxdb2: This service sets up InfluxDB 2 with persistent data storage and configuration.
• telegraf: Telegraf is configured to collect internet speed and memory usage metrics and send them to InfluxDB.

Usage

• Access InfluxDB 2 UI by visiting http://localhost:8086 in your web browser.
• Access Telegraf configurations in ./telegraf/telegraf.conf for any customizations.
• View collected metrics in InfluxDB using queries or explore them in the UI.
• Modify the telegraf.conf file as per your requirements for additional data collection.

Contributing

This is simply a playground for me to experiment so I don't really expect any external contributions. Nevertheless, if you find any issues or have suggestions for improvements, please open an issue or submit a pull request.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2.

Motivation

The goal of this repository is for me to get familiar with the Influx Data Platform, given its optimization towards time series data. I was facing with two needs:

• wished to monitor the quality of my internet speed at home
• wished to monitor uptime of web applications and trigger alerts under certain conditions.

Therefore, throughout this process, I had the following goals:

• I will be setting up from scratch an instance of influx DB
• I will be understanding general good practices when structuring data into Influx DB
• I will be experimenting different data ingest methods into influx DB
• I will be building dashboards
• I will be doing this, so the setup is easily reproducible in any other host device
• I will be looking into how to back-up and restore the data and other configurations done (particularly dashboards)

Challenges and Resolutions

1. Not using the credentials I was using for my admin user: to investigate this, I used Docker Desktop to inspect the container and checking the value of the environment variables I was setting in Docker Compose. Realised that my ${USERNAME} was actually pointing to my Windows User Name, rather than my .env USERNAME. Decided to simply change the environment variable to be unique MYUSERNAME.
2. Cannot create new bucket because organization cannot be found: tried to create via InfluxDB UI a new bucket to add the Demo data, which was failing. Used Influx CLI influx bucket create -n Demo -o <MYORGNAME> -r 0 -t <token> and it just worked. Afterwards, attempted again through InfluxDB UI to create a bucket and it worked.
3. InfluxDB cannot start: the container would stop immediately. Needed a second pair of eyes, but I could find in logs that the password did not fulfill requirements - to test, was just using a 2 character password.