InfluxDB performance - time-series

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.

Related

How to send non aggregated metric to Influx from Springboot application?

I have a SpringBoot application that is under moderate load. I want to collect metric data for a few of the operations of my app. I am majorly interested in Counters and Timers.
I want to count the number of times a method was invoked (# of invocation over a window, for example, #invocation over last 1 day, 1 week, or 1 month)
If the method produces any unexpected result increase failure count and publish a few tags with that metric
I want to time a couple of expensive methods, i.e. I want to see how much time did that method took, and also I want to publish a few tags with metrics to get more context
I have tried StatsD-SignalFx and Micrometer-InfluxDB, but both these solutions have some issues I could not solve
StatsD aggregates the data over flush window and due to aggregation metric tags get messed up. For example, if I send 10 events in a flush window with different tag values, and the StatsD agent aggregates those events and publishes only one event with counter = 10, then I am not sure what tag values it's sending with aggregated data
Micrometer-InfluxDB setup has its own problems, one of them being micrometer sending 0 values for counters if no new metric is produced and in that fake ( 0 value counter) it uses same tag values from last valid (non zero counter)
I am not sure how, but Micrometer also does some sort of aggregation at the client-side in MeterRegistry I believe, because I was getting a few counters with a value of 0.5 in InfluxDB
Next, I am planning to explore Micrometer/StatsD + Telegraf + Influx + Grafana to see if it suits my use case.
Questions:
How to avoid metric aggregation till it reaches the data store (InfluxDB). I can do the required aggregation in Grafana
Is there any standard solution to the problem that I am trying to solve?
Any other suggestion or direction for my use case?

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.

Can InfluxDB have Continuous Queries with same source & target measurements but with different/new tags?

Below is the scenario against which I have this question.
Requirement:
Pre-aggregate time series data within influxDb with granularity of seconds, minutes, hours, days & weeks for each sensor in a device.
Current Proposal:
Create five Continuous Queries (one for each granularity level i.e. Seconds, minutes ...) for each sensor of a device in a different retention policy as that of the raw time series data, when the device is onboarded.
Limitation with Current Proposal:
With increased number of device/sensor (time series data source), the influx will get bloated with too many Continuous Queries (which is not recommended) and will take a toll on the influxDb instance itself.
Question:
To avoid the above problems, is there a possibility to create Continuous Queries on the same source measurement (i.e. raw timeseries measurement) but the aggregates can be differentiated within the measurement using new tags introduced to differentiate the results from Continuous Queries from that of the raw time series data in the measurement.
Example:
CREATE CONTINUOUS QUERY "strain_seconds" ON "database"
RESAMPLE EVERY 5s FOR 1m
BEGIN
SELECT MEAN("strain_top") AS "STRAIN_TOP_MEAN" INTO "database"."raw"."strain" FROM "database"."raw"."strain" GROUP BY time(1s),*
END
As far as I know, and have seen from the docs, it's not possible to apply new tags in continuous queries.
If I've understood the requirements correctly this is one way you could approach it.
CREATE CONTINUOUS QUERY "strain_seconds" ON "database"
RESAMPLE EVERY 5s FOR 1m
BEGIN
SELECT MEAN("strain_top") AS "STRAIN_TOP_MEAN" INTO "database"."raw"."strain" FROM "database"."strain_seconds_retention_policy"."strain" GROUP BY time(1s),*
END
This would save the data in the same measurement but a different retention policy - strain_seconds_retention_policy. When you do a select you specify the corresponding retention policy from which to select.
Note that, it is not possible to perform a select from several retention policies at the same time. If you don't specify one, the default one is used (and not all of them). If it is something you need then another approach could be used.
I don't quite get why you'd need to define a continuous query per device and per sensor. You only need to define five (1 per seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks) and do a group by * (all) which you already do. As long as the source datapoint has a tag with the id for the corresponding device and sensor, the resampled datapoint will have it too. Any newly added devices (data) will just be processed automatically by those 5 queries and saved into the corresponding retention policies.
If you do want to apply additional tags, you could process the data outside the database in a custom script and write it back with any additional tags you need, instead of using continuous queries

InfluxDB Continuous Query running on entire time series data

If my interpretation is correct, according to the documentation provided here:InfluxDB Downsampling when we down-sample data using a Continuous Query running every 30 minutes, it runs only for the previous 30 minutes data.
Relevant part of the document:
Use the CREATE CONTINUOUS QUERY statement to generate a CQ:
CREATE CONTINUOUS QUERY "cq_30m" ON "food_data" BEGIN
SELECT mean("website") AS "mean_website",mean("phone") AS "mean_phone"
INTO "a_year"."downsampled_orders"
FROM "orders"
GROUP BY time(30m)
END
That query creates a CQ called cq_30m in the database food_data.
cq_30m tells InfluxDB to calculate the 30-minute average of the two
fields website and phone in the measurement orders and in the DEFAULT
RP two_hours. It also tells InfluxDB to write those results to the
measurement downsampled_orders in the retention policy a_year with the
field keys mean_website and mean_phone. InfluxDB will run this query
every 30 minutes for the previous 30 minutes.
When I create a Continuous Query it actually runs on the entire dataset, and not on the previous 30 minutes. My question is, does this happen only the first time after which it runs on the previous 30 minutes of data instead of the entire dataset?
I understand that the query itself uses GROUP BY time(30m) which means it'll return all data grouped together but does this also hold true for the Continuous Query? If so, should I then include a filter to only process the last 30 minutes of data in the Continuous Query?
What you have described is expected functionality.
Schedule and coverage
Continuous queries operate on real-time data. They use the local server’s timestamp, the GROUP BY time() interval, and InfluxDB database’s preset time boundaries to determine when to execute and what time range to cover in the query.
CQs execute at the same interval as the cq_query’s GROUP BY time() interval, and they run at the start of the InfluxDB database’s preset time boundaries. If the GROUP BY time() interval is one hour, the CQ executes at the start of every hour.
When the CQ executes, it runs a single query for the time range between now() and now() minus the GROUP BY time() interval. If the GROUP BY time() interval is one hour and the current time is 17:00, the query’s time range is between 16:00 and 16:59.999999999.
So it should only process the last 30 minutes.
Its a good point about the first run.
I did manage to find a snippet from an old document
Backfilling Data
In the event that the source time series already has data in it when you create a new downsampled continuous query, InfluxDB will go back in time and calculate the values for all intervals up to the present. The continuous query will then continue running in the background for all current and future intervals.
https://influxdbcom.readthedocs.io/en/latest/content/docs/v0.8/api/continuous_queries/#backfilling-data
Which would explain the behaviour you have found

Iterating over large amounts of data in InfluxDB

I am looking for an efficient way to iterate over the full data of a influxDB table with ~250 million entries.
I am currently paginating the data by using the OFFSET and LIMIT clauses, however this takes takes a lot of time for higher offsets.
SELECT * FROM diff ORDER BY time LIMIT 1000000 OFFSET 0
takes 21 seconds, whereas
SELECT * FROM diff ORDER BY time LIMIT 1000000 OFFSET 40000000
takes 221 seconds.
I am using the Python influxdb wrapper to send the requests.
Is there a way to optimize this or stream the whole table?
UPDATE : Rembering the timestamp of the last received data, and then using a WHERE time >= last_timestamp on the next query, reduces the query time for higher offsets drastically (query time is always ~25 secs). This is rather cumbersome however, because if two data points share the same timestamp, some results might be present on two pages of data, which has to be detected somehow.
You should use Continuous Queries or Kapacitor. Can you elaborate on your use-case, what you're doing with the stream of data?

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