Embracing Observability with InfluxDB 3.0: Unlimited Cardinality and Native SQL Support

By Jay Clifford / Product, Use Cases
Apr 28, 2023

As the complexity of modern applications continues to increase, so too does the demand for comprehensive observability solutions. Organizations looking to enhance their applications’ performance, reliability, and scalability need powerful tools that allow them to monitor, analyze, and visualize their infrastructure. One such tool is InfluxDB 3.0, a time series database designed to handle large-scale monitoring and analytics workloads.

In this post, we will discuss how you can combine InfluxDB 3.0 and some of its key features, like unlimited cardinality and native SQL support, with other observability tools to deliver greater insights into systems performance. To facilitate this process, the InfluxDB observability repository serves as a valuable reference for converting observability signals (traces, metrics, logs) to and from a common InfluxDB schema.

InfluxDB 3.0: Enabling the next generation of observability platforms

The core of InfluxDB 3.0 is the InfluxDB IOx engine. This is what powers the storage and compute layers of the database. InfluxDB 3.0 has several key benefits that enable users to build the next generation of observability platforms.

Key benefits of using InfluxDB 3.0 for observability

Unlimited cardinality: InfluxDB 3.0’s database engine is designed to handle high cardinality datasets without compromising performance. Effortlessly store and manage traces, metrics, and logs to track your applications and services.

Three data types, one DB: Many observability offerings store traces, metrics, and logs in different storage solutions. This data doesn’t come together until it reaches the observability/visualization layer of the platform. InfluxDB 3.0 provides one place to store all three data types.

Native SQL support: InfluxDB 3.0 offers built-in SQL compatibility, streamlining the experience for developers and data scientists already accustomed to SQL. This allows teams to efficiently extract insights with minimal learning curve, enhancing overall productivity.

High-performance data ingestion: InfluxDB 3.0 is designed to handle high write and query loads, making it suitable for processing massive amounts of monitoring data in real-time. Its high-performance capabilities help developers capture and analyze data to identify patterns, trends, and anomalies, which leads to faster and more informed decision-making.

Seamless integration with observability tools: InfluxDB 3.0 integrates with popular observability tools such as Grafana, Jaeger, and OpenTelemetry to create a powerful ecosystem for monitoring, tracing, and visualizing your infrastructure. Check out the InfluxDB observability repository for help integrating.

Scalability and flexibility: InfluxDB 3.0 can scale horizontally to accommodate growing data volumes and workloads, ensuring that your monitoring solution remains performant and efficient as your infrastructure evolves. Its flexibility allows you to adapt the platform to your specific needs, making it a future-proof choice for observability.

Coming next…

Stick around for the next blog in this series, where we will dive into the InfluxDB observability repository. We will break down each component of the demo architecture, how InfluxDB interprets the OpenTelemetry Schema with its own, and we will also trial a new interactive demo environment on KillerCoda so you can try the demo without installing the repo locally on your system.