Grafana / InfluxDB : $interval data point count and query math - influxdb

Is there a way for Grafana and InfluxDB to tell me how many data points I have put in one Grafana $interval? And to use this in query math?
For example, to make a query:
"SELECT (count("value") / $number_of_data_points_in_interval) FROM...GROUP BY time($interval)" etc.?
background:
I'm writing an InfluxDB query in Grafana:
SELECT count("value") FROM "cpu_value" WHERE "type_instance" = 'idle' AND value < 0.5 AND $timeFilter GROUP BY time($interval) fill(null)
My goal is to display how many cpu cores are over 99.5% in use at any point in time, but the problem is that as Grafana changes the $interval depending on zoom level, the values for my query start to get very big-- far larger than the number of cores on my machine.
The simple solution would be to divide the count that the query returns by the number of data points put in each $interval, so the result will scale to the number of cores I have.

Related

Influxdb speed up query over long time periods with group by

i write sensor data every second to an influxdb database. Displaying weekly, monthly or yearly summaries in grafana is quite slow since it needs to query many thousand values.
To speed things up, i was thinking about using a cron job to run a queries like
select mean(sensor1) into data_avg_1h from data where time > start and time <= end group by time(1h)
select mean(sensor1) into data_avg_1d from data where time > start and time <= end group by time(1d)
select mean(sensor1) into data_avg_1w from data where time > start and time <= end group by time(1w)
This would mean i need more storage, but queries run much faster.
Is this a bodge job or acceptable and is there a more clever way to do something like that?
Yes. It is perfectly ok and it is also recommended to downsample the data like you have mentioned in the question.
However, instead of using a cronjob it will be better to use Continuous query feature of InfluxDB to achieve the same result.
Downsampling & Contious Query Documentation.
Please be aware that when storing the average value for short period, if you want to calculate the average for a longer period from this downsampled data you will have to calculate the weighted average. Otherwise, you will calculating the average of average which, may not be equal to the average value calculated from the Original data.
This is because, each downsampled average value might be having different number of datapoints.
So while calculating the mean on regular interval store the number of data points received in that interval. This way you will be able to calculate the weighted average.

InfluxDB: INTO with multiple measurement

I'm trying to write aggregated result from two measurements into a single measurement.
I found on documentation that you can write multiple matching measurements with :MEASUREMENT keyword in INTO query. Like
SELECT * INTO "copy_NOAA_water_database"."autogen".:MEASUREMENT FROM
"NOAA_water_database"."autogen"./.*/
What I'm trying to do is aggregate from multiple measurements and write result to a single measurement.
SELECT mean("water_level") INTO
"copy_NOAA_water_database"."autogen"."water_agg" FROM
"NOAA_water_database"."autogen"./.*/ GROUP BY time(15m), *
The above query runs successfully, but I'm not sure whether influx has considered points from all measurement of NOAA_water_database or just last appearing measurement is considered.
Q: I'm not sure whether influx has considered points from all measurement of NOAA_water_database or just last appearing measurement is considered.
A: I suspect influxdb is not aggregating the data from your measurements.
I think it is only aggregating the data from each measurement individually and then for each output write it to your specified measurement and since the resolved time of the mean operation can possibly be the same, measurement B's result can overwrite measurement A's result.
I derived this theory by doing an experiment using the following dataset;
INSERT cpu,host=serverA value=10
INSERT cpu,host=serverA value=20
INSERT cpu2,host=serverA value=5
INSERT cpu2,host=serverA value=15
Doing a SELECT statement similar to your query above returns;
select * FROM "historian"."autogen"./cpu.*/
name: cpu
time host value
---- ---- -----
1546511130857357196 serverA 10
1546511132744883738 serverA 20
name: cpu2
time host value
---- ---- -----
1546511156629403118 serverA 5
1546511157888695746 serverA 15
Then instead of using mean I do sum to find test the behaviour of influxdb.
I also simplified the query by dropping the groupBy operation.
Doing a sum gives me;
SELECT sum("value") INTO test_sum FROM "historian"."autogen"./.*/
name: result
time written
---- -------
0 2
> select * from test_sum;
name: test_sum
time sum
---- ---
0 20
Theory: if influx is aggregating the data from all measurements, the sum result would not be 20. It should be 50. The only way 20 can be derived is from by summing 5 + 15 which is the data from the last measurement.
But when we do the sum operation, influx did told us 2 rows were written. My theory to this is that, the influx did calculate the sum of the first measurement however as first and second summation's result time is both 0 therefore the 2nd measurement's result would have overwritten the first result's.
Recommended solution:
The best tool to do this job is actually influxdb's kapacitor. It is a great tool because it is fast however it is also extremely to learn.
Alternatively if your dataset isn't huge which I suspect it should be alright since you are grouping by 15m. You can write a script in your favourite programming language to read out the data, do the mean and then write the data back to influxdb.

Difference of measurement filtered by tag in InfluxDB

In InfluxDB v1.3, I have a measurement with one field and a tag that can take two values.
I would like to compute (x where mytag=y) - (x where mytag=z), using the last value of each series when needed (something like an http://code.kx.com/wiki/Reference/aj). I would like to do this in one query, if possible.
If the above is not possible, is there a different schema (e.g. using separate measurements) where what I would like to do is feasible? If so, can you please elaborate on the structure and the query?
SELECT difference(mean(x))
FROM <measurement>
WHERE time > now() - 1h and (mytag='y' OR mytag='x')
GROUP BY time(60s), mytag
Functions like difference require an aggregate query (group by time()) as well as an aggregation function for the values within the grouped window (mean above).
Difference then shows the differences between sequential aggregated values for the time period specified, additionally grouped by the two tag values specified.
These can be adjusted depending on your data.

InfluxDB and Grafana graph using midnight as 0 on Y-axis derivative

I am graphing with Grafana (2.6.0) and I have an InfluxDB (0.10.2) database with the following data in it:
> select * from "WattmeterMainskwh" where time > now() - 5m
name: WattmeterMainskwh
-----------------------
time value
1457579891000000000 15529.322
1457579956000000000 15529.411
1457580011000000000 15529.425
1457580072000000000 15529.460
1457580135000000000 15529.476
...etc...
This data collects my household kilowatt usage as measured by a kWH gauge that steadily increments the usage value across months or years. I cannot easily reset the counter, nor do I wish to do so.
My goal is to create a graph that shows my daily kWH use over 24 hour periods starting at midnight, or at a minimum showing relative kWH over the interval displayed. This type of graph would be useful in many other circumstances as well where I could imagine "errors across the day" or "visitors since opening time" or "BGP resets per calendar week" were useful but the collection counter was not reset to zero upon the reset or turn-over of the time interval. This kind of counting is actually quite common in my experience.
This graph works, but doesn't show me what I'm looking for:
SELECT derivative(mean("value")) FROM "WattmeterMainskwh" WHERE $timeFilter GROUP BY time($interval) fill(null)
That graph just shows the difference between one sample and the previous sample. What I want is a steadily increasing line starting from the left side of the graph and increasing towards the right side of the graph, with zero as the bottom of the Y axis, and the graph starting at zero at the farthest left X value.
This graph works too and shows me the correct curve, but it's off by fifteen thousand or so. So far, it's the closest to what I want but since this is an ever-increasing counter that can't be reset I need to subtract some from the Y axis. Ideally, I'd like to subtract whatever the value was at the previous midnight from each sample to get a relative number based on a day instead of an absolute based on all time.
SELECT sum("value") FROM "WattmeterMainskwh" WHERE $timeFilter GROUP BY time($interval) fill(null)
And here's the graph from that previous statement:
Graph that is off by 15k
This attempt didn't work - I apparently can't take a sum of a derivative group:
SELECT sum(derivative(mean("value"))) FROM "WattmeterMainskwh" WHERE $timeFilter GROUP BY time($interval) fill(null)
This doesn't work, either - I can't perform functions within "derivative":
SELECT derivative(sum("value")-first("value")) FROM "WattmeterMainskwh" WHERE $timeFilter GROUP BY time($interval) fill(null)
Of course, I could just create a new value that had calculations applied to it before I wrote it into InfluxDB, but that seems to me to be a data-redundant and sloppy way to solve this problem, as well as being quite inflexible if I want to look at other intervals on a whim. I'm hoping that there is some way to do this more elegantly within the combination of InfluxDB & Grafana, but I'm just not able to find it with the search terms I've used or the thinking I've put towards interpreting the documentation.
Is this type of graph even possible with InfluxDB/Grafana? As far as I can tell a continuous query is not a solution, and the lack of nested SELECTs makes even the hackish ways of doing this not obvious to me.
BONUS: It would be really great to have the graph show midnight every night as a "zero" location, instead of "zero" being the first point in the displayed interval, so looking at five days of normal data would show five distinct "waves" of increasing daily aggregate energy usage, with the wave Y value going back down to zero at 12:00:01 on each day. But I'll take whatever I can get.
Nested functions have only partial support. However, you can effectively nest functions by chaining Continuous Queries.
Use a CQ to calculate the derivative(mean(value)) and store that in a new measurement foo. Then for your graph you can query select sum(value) from foo.
(I know this answer is quite late, but it might help others. Oh, and please excuse me for all the Dutch in my graphs; I had to keep it in dutch for the highest possible WAF)
You could do what I do for my kWh calculations:
Which results in a simple query like this:
SELECT distinct("kwh_combined") FROM "smartmeter" WHERE $timeFilter GROUP BY time($__interval) fill(linear)
In order to get your total count.. or if you want it in a nice graph like this which shows the number of kWh's used per hour in the bars and the yellow line (I normally run in dark mode, excuse the yellow) which is my current WATT power draw:
This data (or at least your hourly usage in bars) can be retrieved by a query like this:
Which is this exact query (for B):
SELECT spread("kwh_combined") FROM "smartmeter" WHERE $timeFilter GROUP BY time(1h) fill(null)
... where the 'kwh_combined' is (still) my counter just counting up and up.
All this results in me being able to 'query' the InfluxDB for a certain time period, like "last 24 hours" to come up with a nice panel like this: (ignore the encircled prices, that was for a question I posted I just made 10 minutes ago, check my PS)
I hope this helps you or anyone else; it took me some figuring out, but I'm happy to give something back to the community :)
PS: Don't be as stupid as I was and hardcode your electrical and gas prices into your dashboard but store them with your measurements as they could change over time.
I had the same problem (same application even) and solved it here. In your case, the query should be roughly:
SELECT value-value_fill FROM
(SELECT first(value) as value_fill FROM WattmeterMainskwh WHERE time>now()-7d GROUP BY time(1d)),
(SELECT first(value) as value FROM WattmeterMainskwh WHERE time>now()-7d GROUP BY time(1h))
fill(previous)

InfluxDB performance

For my case, I need to capture 15 performance metrics for devices and save it to InfluxDB. Each device has a unique device id.
Metrics are written into InfluxDB in the following way. Here I only show one as an example
new Serie.Builder("perfmetric1")
.columns("time", "value", "id", "type")
.values(getTime(), getPerf1(), getId(), getType())
.build()
Writing data is fast and easy. But I saw bad performance when I run query. I'm trying to get all 15 metric values for the last one hour.
select value from perfmetric1, perfmetric2, ..., permetric15
where id='testdeviceid' and time > now() - 1h
For an hour, each metric has 120 data points, in total it's 1800 data points. The query takes about 5 seconds on a c4.4xlarge EC2 instance when it's idle.
I believe InfluxDB can do better. Is this a problem of my schema design, or is it something else? Would splitting the query into 15 parallel calls go faster?
As #valentin answer says, you need to build an index for the id column for InfluxDB to perform these queries efficiently.
In 0.8 stable you can do this "indexing" using continuous fanout queries. For example, the following continuous query will expand your perfmetric1 series into multiple series of the form perfmetric1.id:
select * from perfmetric1 into perfmetric1.[id];
Later you would do:
select value from perfmetric1.testdeviceid, perfmetric2.testdeviceid, ..., permetric15.testdeviceid where time > now() - 1h
This query will take much less time to complete since InfluxDB won't have to perform a full scan of the timeseries to get the points for each testdeviceid.
Build an index on id column. Seems that he engine uses full scan on table to retrieve data. By splitting your query in 15 threads, the engine will use 15 full scans and the performance will be much worse.

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