Nobl9’s Service Level Objectives Platform Runs on InfluxDB

By Jason Myers / Use Cases, Product, Developer
Jul 06, 2022

Tracking Service Level Objectives (SLOs) helps developers build more reliable software. At least, that’s the hope of Nobl9. The company’s self-titled SLO platform provides real-time data to software developers, DevOps practitioners, and reliability engineers so that they have the information they need to build reliable features quickly.

Nobl9 is an SLO management platform that integrates with customers’ existing observability tools and enables businesses to link monitoring and other logging and tracing data to user happiness and business KPIs. With support for twenty-four different data sources (and growing), it pulls in service level indicators (SLIs) from those sources and uses that data to calculate SLOs.

Nobl9 does more with InfluxDB

SLOs are essentially a type of time series data, so the Nobl9 team knew they needed a time series database. They chose InfluxDB because it was able to handle the query load for slicing and dicing data in all the ways necessary. Nobl9 has customers that operate in a wide range of technical environments, so the fact that InfluxDB is available in multiple environments was another benefit.

Nobl9 uses InfluxDB in several different ways to get data in and push data out from the platform. One critical way in which Nobl9 leverages InfluxDB is for data ingest. Nobl9 provides two integration options, one is agent-based and the other is an SaaS-to-SaaS connection. Underpinning both options is Telegraf, which Nobl9 extended by creating custom plugins for data ingest. This enables the Nobl9 platform to handle a wide range of data from all the different data sources it supports.

Another area where InfluxDB plays a critical role for Nobl9 is in data visualizations. After calculating SLOs, Nobl9 pushes that data to InfluxDB, which feeds an array of dashboards. Using a combination of Flux and tasks, the Nobl9 team has a ton of flexibility to write queries and automate processes that meet the requirements of the wide variety of SLOs and use cases required by their users.

When it comes to exporting data the Nobl9 platform, again, offers two different methods. The platform supports both batch and real-time data exports. InfluxDB is an asset for real-time exporting because it integrates with so many tools, which means users can connect Nobl9 to any desired output source.

The future of Nobl9

Nobl9 built a powerful platform on InfluxDB that tracks SLOs with ease and empowers site reliability engineers to set up automated alerting and make their software more reliable. Integrating InfluxDB into the core Nobl9 platform enables several key functions. From data ingest, to data visualization, and data export, Nobl9 leverages InfluxDB to manage its data pipeline.

The company continues to explore new ways to utilize SLOs and make them even more precise and relevant to the needs of its customer base. For more details on the Nobl9 platform and how it uses InfluxDB, check out the full case study.