Announcing the InfluxData Sandbox

By Jack Zampolin / Product, Use Cases, Developer
Apr 05, 2017

Today I’m happy to announce the InfluxData sandbox. The sandbox runs the entire suite of InfluxData products for use as a learning tool. With all of our previous full stack tutorials, such as this one for Kapacitor, you need to install each of the products separately and configure them to work together. This sandbox eliminates all the extra work and confusion.

Working with the Sandbox

Many operations have additional steps to be taken at each level of the stack. For example, adding a new input to Telegraf gives additional metrics to alert on, graph, and downsample. The sandbox makes the setup transparent so that you can focus on understanding the task you need to perform.

Working with the sandbox is meant to simulate a production InfluxData installation running on separate machines without the management complexity. Currently the sandbox hosts a number of tutorials for setting up authentication for the TICK Stack, and creating your first alert in Kapacitor using the UI in Chronograf. We will be adding more tutorials to the sandbox as features are added and at users’ requests. To request a new tutorial open an issue on sandbox, or post your request over on community.influxdata.com.

This project was built using Docker. The necessary network and volume configurations are specified in the ./docker-compose.yaml file at the root of the project. That file contains comments to show how to change the versions of each product run by the sandbox.

Get the Sandbox!

The sandbox is available on github (influxdata/sandbox). To get started just clone the repo and run ./sandbox up. This downloads docker images for each of the products and starts them in the proper configuration. You browser will open Chronograf and the tutorials in separate tabs. Just follow the quick instructions in the README.md to connect InfluxDB and Kapacitor to Chronograf and you are ready to go!

The sandbox persists data in the cloned directory to make for easy install/uninstall as well as inspection of the data directories for each product. This means that you can stop the standbox and easily come back to your previous state, or just as easily wipe everything and start from scratch.

So what are you waiting for? Go give it a try!