InfluxData Community Update Q1 2020

By Samantha Wang / Product, Use Cases, Developer
Mar 11, 2020

At InfluxData, we love the community! Our amazing open source members are an integral part of InfluxData and have been since its founding. They’ve helped us build amazing products for time series data. This is a quick update to give you some insight into how we track metrics about our community and ensure we are building products and features that our users want to see.

InfluxDB Community Templates

A couple weeks ago, our new community manager, Michael Hall, announced InfluxDB Community Templates. These templates provide users the capability to easily download and run an entire monitoring configuration for various use cases. Since many InfluxDB users have similar use cases, the Community Templates give them the opportunity to share their configurations with other users and constantly improve them.

Give one of the InfluxDB Templates a try! If there’s one you would like to build but don’t see created, go ahead and contribute one yourself! If you have an idea for a template that you think would be useful, feel free to open an issue and we will see what we can do to support you.

InfluxData Community Slack

A year ago, we launched our InfluxData Community Slack workspace. Since then, it has grown to over 1,400 members and 37 public channels. On any given day, we have over 200 active users and nearly 100 posts. It’s a great place to converse directly with InfluxData engineers or other folks in our community about the projects you’re working on. You can ask questions or discuss issues you may have about using InfluxDB, Flux, Telegraf, or any of our open source products. We recently added a #showme channel where community members and InfluxData Engineers can share demos and new features they’re working on or just cool ways they’re using the product. Join and show us how you’re using InfluxDB!

Of course, Slack isn’t the only place you can find us. You can also find us on the Community Website, Twitter, and Reddit. Don’t see an InfluxDB area somewhere it should be? Why not start it and let us know?

InfluxData on GitHub

We have around 180 public repos in InfluxData, so keeping track of issues opened across them can be a challenge. Luckily, we have some amazing products for collecting and processing events, which is exactly what we do. At the root of our InfluxData GitHub organization, we have a webhook sending data to Telegraf GitHub Webhook input and loading those events into an internal cluster that we maintain. That lets us keep track of new issues created across all our repositories, and the power of Flux means we can build advanced queries to filter based on internal/external contributors.

<figcaption> Monthly number of issues opened by community members month-over-month (Dec. 2019 - Feb. 2020)</figcaption>

So far in 2020, we’ve had community members open 350 issues and complete 380 commits. We are using these trackers to help us put forth a greater effort of guaranteeing all our community issues are responded to.

We are also listening to feedback about our process. Based on that, we have removed the Stale[Bot] integration from our GitHub organization to ensure that issues aren’t automatically closed. If something you really wanted was closed, please add a comment and mention @russorat, @mhall119 or @sjwang90 and we will take a second look.

We have also been working to reduce our resolution time for new issues. We can always do better, but to give you an idea of where we are today, we see issues opened in InfluxDB and Telegraf repositories have been resolved on average in less than 5 days, and that is a target we are continuing to strive to across all our repos.

Product highlights

InfluxDB 2.0 OSS

At the beginning of this year, we announced the release of InfluxDB OSS 2.0 Beta. We had spent much of 2019 building out our Alpha version to get to the point where we had a reliable Beta product with a robust set of new features, including core capabilities for InfluxDB Templates. The faster we can find and fix issues in Beta and improve the overall InfluxDB OSS experience, the faster we can get to an official 2.0 release. So if you’re not in a production environment, we encourage you to download the latest open-source InfluxDB version and open up any issues you may encounter.

Flux

We have been working on improving Flux — our powerful query and scripting language — since before our first Alpha release. Flux is the future of querying data in InfluxDB, and if you really want to unlock the power of your data, it’s the best way to do it. Language development is difficult and in order to build an awesome language, we need the help of the community. The Flux team relies on issues from users to get insight into usability, and we highly value pull requests that help us continue to innovate. Overall performance and usability are key focal points as we work towards an open source InfluxDB release. We are working hard to make contributing to Flux easier and even more rewarding for the community.

Telegraf

Telegraf is our largest community project and has continued to grow over the years with over 250 plugins, most of which have been written by the community. The wide-ranging capabilities of Telegraf would not be possible without your help. Telegraf has always been a great place to find issues to work on for those interested in getting started with open source or Golang. We love collaborating with our Telegraf community, so keep up the great work!

Most importantly, we want to hear from you!

The most important aspect of any open source company and product is the communication with the community. We always enjoy hearing how you’re using InfluxDB at home or work. As mentioned before, please join our Community Slack or give us feedback directly through GitHub.