InfluxData, the modern Open Source Platform built specifically for metrics, events and other time series data that empowers developers to build next-generation monitoring, analytics and IoT applications, today announced the latest versions of InfluxEnterprise and InfluxDB with expanded support for high cardinality time series data streams that are generated by growing deployments of IoT sensors, containers and Kubernetes and are often ephemeral in nature.

Ephemeral data, or data lasting for a very short period of time, is becoming the norm as organizations move into the Age of Instrumentation and deploy more IoT sensors and spin up containers with sophisticated orchestrators such as Kubernetes. Without InfluxData’s InfluxDB, organizations run into performance and query bottlenecks as they try to support the ever- increasing workloads from sensors, containers, and services. Furthermore, even though the data generated is ephemeral, enterprises need to store this data for as long as seven years for audit and forensics purposes.

InfluxEnterprise is the only Time Series Platform that has been designed from the ground up to handle metrics and events time series data. It is software that can run on-premises or on any cloud provider, and supports the collection, storage, monitoring, visualization, and alerting of time series data.InfluxDB, the industry’s most popular Time Series Database management system according to DB-Engines’ latest results, is used as its data store for large amounts of timestamped data, including DevOps monitoring, application metrics, IoT sensor data, and real-time analytics.

“InfluxEnterprise has been an important and highly available (HA) time series data store for the millions of metrics that we gather daily from the CJC Cloud Platform – our private cloud managed service offering used by the top financial institutions around the world,” said Peter Williams, CTO of CJC. “In addition, InfluxDB’s high writes and fast queries allow our platform to present data efficiently and quickly to our customers, which is crucial to helping them optimize their commercial processes, data operations and regulatory obligations.”

In order to support ephemeral time series data, InfluxData introduced the concept of a Time Series Index (TSI). The new time series index, or TSI, moves the index to files on disk that can be mapped in memory. TSI was introduced last year for community feedback, and now it is generally available for both InfluxDB and InfluxEnterprise. It provides support for a large number of active series, and is often used for gathering metrics and events for containers which are spun up and down quickly and in large numbers. InfluxData’s updates continue to support the growing use of containers from partners, including IBM, Red Hat, Google, and Microsoft Azure.

Other updates in this release include improvements in the backup functionality. Backups can now be restored across InfluxEnterprise and open source software, and restoration of runs can be made in online mode without overwriting existing databases. With this new release, InfluxData can serve as a good option as a long-term store for Prometheus.

“After our community’s requests and support testing this new release, we are pleased to make these new capabilities generally available to help developers be more effective,” said Tim Hall, InfluxData VP of Products. “More data being generated by containers and IoT sensors continues to support the need for a purpose-built Time Series Database like InfluxData. This new release focuses on this ephemeral data because organizations need to keep this data in a long-term store for audit purposes.”

The InfluxData Platform provides a comprehensive set of tools and services to accumulate metrics and events data, analyze the data, and act on the data via powerful visualizations and notifications. InfluxData’s unique features enable customers to quickly build:

  • Monitoring, alerting and notification applications supporting their DevOps initiatives
  • IoT applications supporting millions of events per second, providing new business value around predictive maintenance and real-time alerting and control
  • Real-time analytics applications that are focused on streaming data and anomaly detection

InfluxData has rapidly built its developer and customer base across industries – including manufacturing, financial services, energy, and telecommunications – by delivering the fastest growing Open Source Platform that enables customers to derive better business insights, data-driven real-time actions, and a consolidated single view of their entire infrastructure, from applications to microservices and from systems to sensors. More than 400 customers, including Cisco Systems, Coupa Software, IBM, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Nordstrom, and Tesla, have selected InfluxData as their modern data platform for metrics and events. InfluxData is pioneering the shift to time series in a modern metrics and events platform, and is making it possible for customers to become data-driven and take on digital transformation initiatives.