Metrics with InfluxDB

[axelrindle]

This is meant for everybody who's is using InfluxDB for their metrics.

Requirements

• InfluxDB v2

How-to

The /metrics endpoint can be scraped by an InfluxDB instance. Let's say this is your configuration:

httpPort: 5301

metrics:
  enable: true
  path: /metrics

// other settings ...

Then just login to the InfluxDB UI and create a new Scraper:

The metrics will appear in the selected bucket.

Further Reading

• https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v2.3/write-data/no-code/scrape-data/

[0xERR0R]

That is cool. Are there some advantages compared to prometheus? Do you use Grafana for visualization? I assume, the prometheus dashbort will not work because it uses prometheus aggregation functions or does InfluxDB support all of them?

[axelrindle]

I don't remember why I started using InfluxDB specifically. My homeserver is running on a Raspberry Pi and as far as I can tell, Prometheus didn't support running on ARM devices a while ago. Also, I use Telegraf, which is an agent for collecting all kinds of metrics from different systems like Webservers, Docker or hardware metrics. Telegraf does not support exporting to Prometheus.

I do use Grafana for visualization, but did not create a dashboard for blocky yet. The dashboard import will probably not work for me as I do not run a Prometheus instance. I will try to reproduce the dashboard for InfluxDB.

InfluxDB uses it's own query language which is called Flux. I don't think that this is compatible with PromQL.

[0xERR0R]

ok, thanks. BTW: prometheus runs fine on raspberry pi. I run prometheus/grafana stack on pi3 as docker containers.

[axelrindle]

Sounds good. I will give Prometheus a try then.