Monitoring COVID-19 in South America with InfluxDB

By Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck / Product, Use Cases, Developer
Dec 22, 2020

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Monitoring COVID-19 metrics has become essential as the Coronavirus pandemic continues to impact countries across the globe. Mitigating virus impact and spread requires ongoing tracking of metrics such as cases and fatalities. This is what the InfluxDB COVID-19 Monitoring Template does.

Introducing the InfluxDB COVID-19 Monitoring Template

The template provides a dashboard that includes information about COVID-19 focused on the South American region; primarily Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. I created it, as a contributor to the InfluxDB Community, before I joined InfluxData as a Solution Architect.

I developed the template because I wanted to track the COVID-19 situation, not only in Uruguay where I live, but also in the South American region. I have family in Argentina, and friends in Chile and Paraguay, so I looked to monitor all the region. Groups that would find this template useful are those who want to know how other countries are ‘performing’ in the development of the pandemic.

Previously, I had built a COVID-19 monitoring Chronograf dashboard. Once InfluxDB Templates for the InfluxDB UI (which includes a built-in visualization engine) were launched, I then built the InfluxDB Template for the same purpose. The template’s dashboard is shown below.

COVID-19 dashboard

Dashboard information includes current data, new cases, graph about totals of cases and deaths, as well as — for reference — overall worldwide information about cases and deaths.

As for how this template compares to other open source COVID-19 monitoring dashboards, the only dashboard I’ve seen with the kind of information I want is the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) dashboard. The ‘problem’ with this dashboard was that I couldn’t group the data for the countries I’m interested in. To install this InfluxDB template and get started with COVID-19 monitoring today, sign up for your free InfluxDB Cloud account.

The growing popularity of InfluxDB Templates

InfluxDB Templates let you quickly define your entire monitoring configuration (data sources, dashboards, and alerts) for any technology in one easily-shared, open-source text file that can be imported into InfluxDB with a single command. Most of the templates are community-contributed, and here are the guidelines for building and submitting an InfluxDB Template.

Using InfluxDB Templates is straightforward. You can start to track wherever you want, in most cases in a minute or so, and most of the templates don’t require more than defining a few things such as environment variables. To start, just import a template from the Community Templates on GitHub, export the HOST, TOKEN, and ORG as variables, copy the URL for the Telegraf config, run it in your machine or a container, and you’re done.

Since I started contributing InfluxDB templates, I’ve seen the number of forks in the repository go up. Also, I really like seeing that InfluxDB use cases are not only focused on systems monitoring but also on tracking game progress, like Fortnite and CS:GO, currencies and home automation things.