Exploding Demand for Monitoring Solutions

By Tim Hall / Developer
Feb 08, 2017

I’ve been on board InfluxData for just a few weeks now, and one part of getting up to speed is attempting to understand how our existing customers are leveraging the technology that our team has built.  As a product manager, I’m always surprised at how the technology products I’ve worked end up being used – frequently in ways that I never imagined – and the TICK stack is no exception.  One of the key use cases centers around monitoring.  When you monitor things, there are metrics which are typically sampled at some recurring interval, and there are more transient events which occur at a specific time. InfluxDB was built with both these kinds of regular and irregular time-series data in mind.

The technology landscape continues to change, and the quantity and variety of things being monitored are exploding. This is being fueled by the rapid adoption of containers for all types of workloads – from supporting web-based applications to big data workloads and machine learning jobs. We appear to be experiencing a significant inflection point as organizations consider “digital transformations” to support new business requirements which require new IT investments and architectures.  The adoption of technologies to enable this transformation, starting with Docker containers and extending into container orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, and HashiCorp’s Terraform, is triggering a refresh cycle related to monitoring.

Along with the team here at InfluxData, we pulled together five requirements that you might want to consider as you think about your monitoring solutions and the goals you have for the monitoring data you collect.  We hope you find this useful.