Unlock Value with InfluxDB 3.0 and Expert Support Teams

By Jessica Wachtel / Product
Aug 06, 2024

InfluxDB is all about your data: we bridge the gap between an empty database bucket and business value and provide experts to help you derive value from your data. InfluxDB expert support teams come with contracted InfluxDB 3.0 serverless products (Serverless, Cloud Dedicated) and our Clustered on-prem product. Though no customer is left to figure everything out on their own, your product selection will determine the level of custom support you receive. This post provides insight into working with InfluxDB support for both serverless and on-prem instances of InfluxDB 3.0.

InfluxDB 3.0 products

All InfluxDB 3.0 products are built on the same columnar database engine, purpose-built for time series workloads. Compared to earlier OSS versions, you can expect better write throughput, a reduction in storage costs due to support for cheaper object storage, faster queries for high cardinality data, and faster queries for recently written data across all 3.0 products. Where they differ is the level of data isolation, ability to customize your build, and extent of support involvement.

InfluxDB Cloud Serverless

Cloud Serverless is a serverless multi-tenant instance of InfluxDB. Cloud Serverless is a managed instance of InfluxDB on shared resources—it’s best suited for smaller time series workloads, including customers with a large workload looking to utilize InfluxDB for some of their data or companies with less time series data. As your workload grows, you can easily move to an isolated instance of InfluxDB. You can get started with InfluxDB Cloud Serverless in just a few minutes.

InfluxDB Cloud Dedicated

Cloud Dedicated is a serverless single-tenant instance of InfluxDB, managed on isolated resources. It’s designed for enterprise-grade workloads at scale and those who require data isolation and prefer a serverless, managed product. Cloud Dedicated offers a higher level of customization than Cloud Serverless: you can build custom partitions and optimize query performance. Our support team will work with you to custom-tune your Cloud Dedicated instance based on your workload’s specifications. InfluxDB support merges its operations behavior with a customer-first focus, leading to a very high-touch experience for Cloud Dedicated customers.

InfluxDB Clustered

Clustered is an on-prem or private cloud instance of InfluxDB. Like Cloud Dedicated, Clustered is designed for enterprise-grade time series workloads operating at scale. Because Clustered runs in your environment, it’s a self-managed service that provides the highest degree of customization. This includes query optimizations, custom partitioning, and additional tuning, which are only available in the self-managed infrastructure. Clustered operates in the Kubernetes environment. This is key when evaluating whether Clustered is the right product for your organization. If you don’t have engineers with Kubernetes expertise, Clustered may require additional developer resources on your end and potential changes to your development environments.

Support tiers

Consultative Support

Though Clustered is a self-managed product, there is an overlap with Cloud Dedicated and Serverless in terms of consultative support. Customers aren’t limited by their engineering teams’ level of InfluxDB expertise. Our support team works alongside our customers’ engineering teams to fill the experiential gaps between them and what InfluxDB needs.

One of the most critical services our support team offers is providing context and a deep understanding of how best practices apply to your preferences and desired outcomes. How you decide to store your data will have a significant impact down the line. Our support team works with your engineering teams to ensure that best practices form the underlying data management foundation. This will save human and financial resources and offer optimal results from your data.

Schema design and data durability are two examples where support helps customers with best practices. InfluxDB uses schema on write, adding flexibility to how you decide to store your data. However, it’s important to consider the optimal number of tags and contextual information collected in a data set to optimize data storage and overall performance. Data durability refers to how long you keep data. Optimizing storage looks very different for customers with ephemeral data stored in InfluxDB for 48 hours versus data stored in perpetuity.

Managed Service vs. Self-Managed Service

The main difference between a managed service and a self-hosted service is the level of visibility our support teams have into your database instance. InfluxData hosts its serverless products on its own infrastructure, meaning our support teams have complete visibility into your instance of InfluxDB. This eliminates the need for customers to manage any database resources, including migrating to InfluxDB from another product, database security, backup and recovery, high availability configurations, performance monitoring, and more.

Outsourced Resources

InfluxDB managed services offer customers a “set it and forget it” experience. The service removes the technical overhead burden from the customer, including additional headcount and engineering resources, because you’re outsourcing your database administration team.

In the event of an issue, both managed and self-managed products have access to our support team, but the support workflow differs between the two. Since our team has direct access to your cluster in a managed service, support can immediately begin troubleshooting and acting on solutions with minimal to no customer intervention. With our self-managed service, our support team works alongside your engineers because they won’t have direct access to the system.

Scaling

Our Clustered and Cloud Dedicated products scale alongside temporary and permanent customer growth. When a Cloud Dedicated cluster receives an increased data load, a support team member reviews the cluster and proactively or reactively adjusts memory or instantly increases an instance’s size. Though it might look automatic to the customer, it is not an automatic process. We can manually scale clusters up and down in response to appropriate qualifying events. This scaling support is included in our managed service.

It isn’t hard to scale up on-prem, but it requires a little more legwork from our customers. Rather than InfluxDB support scaling your cluster, your engineers must complete the action. They’ll need to monitor data volume and scale accordingly. When you’re ready to scale, let your Account Executive know, and they can provide additional licenses to purchase.

Maintenance

Maintenance updates become available to Cloud Serverless, Cloud Dedicated, and Clustered customers at the same time. The speed at which they are incorporated into your instance of InfluxDB varies between managed and self-managed services. Our managed service performs all maintenance updates and operations on your behalf without interruption. On-prem customers will have to conduct their own maintenance operations. Depending on the organization, this can delay the speed at which the software is updated, as processing and reviewing processes can delay the update installations.

Disaster Recovery

Customers accidentally delete their data.ot often, but it happens. The degree to which the data is recoverable doesn’t vary between self-managed and managed database instances. However, the speed of recovery may. When using a managed product, InfluxDB engineers immediately begin the restoration troubleshooting process. Support cannot work directly in your cluster ifyou’re using a product within your own environment, but they’ll work hand-in-hand with your engineers throughout the restoration process. You’ll recover your data in both cases but data recovery is quicker in a managed environment.

Get started with InfluxDB!

InfluxDB offers a range of products tailored to meet various organizational needs, from managed serverless solutions like Cloud Serverless and Cloud Dedicated to self-managed on-prem solutions like Clustered. Our support teams work closely with your engineers to ensure seamless operations, whether you choose a managed or self-managed service. By leveraging our expertise and customizable solutions, you can optimize your data storage, performance, and recovery processes, ultimately driving greater business value and operational efficiency.

Ready to get started? Contact sales for a custom POC or sign up for a free cloud account now.