InfluxDB
Purpose-built time series database for metrics, events, and real-time analytics
Overview
Description
InfluxDB is a purpose-built time series database for storing and querying metrics, events, and sensor data at high write volume. It's designed for workloads like infrastructure monitoring, IoT telemetry, and real-time analytics where data arrives continuously and needs fast time-windowed queries.
Features
- High-Throughput Ingestion: Writes millions of data points per second from metrics and sensor pipelines.
- Time-Windowed Queries: Runs fast aggregations over arbitrary time ranges with native downsampling.
- Flux & SQL Query Languages: Supports both InfluxQL/SQL and the purpose-built Flux language.
- Retention Policies: Automatically expires old data to control storage growth.
- Built-In Visualization: Ships a dashboard UI (Chronograf-style) for exploring metrics directly.
- Telegraf Integration: Collects metrics from 300+ sources via the companion Telegraf agent.
Technology Stack
Core engine written in Rust (InfluxDB 3.x) and Go (earlier versions), built on a custom time-series storage engine. Integrates with Grafana, Telegraf, and client libraries for Python, Go, and JavaScript.
Requirements
Linux, macOS, or Docker; at least 2 GB RAM for small deployments (production clusters need significantly more depending on write volume); fast local disk recommended for write-heavy workloads.