InfluxDB Live Product Training

Session date: Oct 13, 2021 10:00am (Pacific Time)

COOL WAYS TO GET STARTED

Join us for a live InfluxDB training to learn how to easily ingest at scale in a matter of seconds to help you build powerful time series based applications. Join our 45-minute demos with experts who will showcase key InfluxDB features and answer questions live from the audience.

After attending this training, attendees will be able to:

• Use sample data sets to try out various visualization options
• Utilize the available data ingestion methods to construct a data pipeline to InfluxDB
• Leverage Notebooks to collaborate with team members
• Gain best practices for InfluxDB, Telegraf and Flux

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Here is an unedited transcript of the webinar “InfluxDB Live Product Training”. This is provided for those who prefer to read than watch the webinar. Please note that the transcript is raw. We apologize for any transcribing errors.

Speakers:

• Caitlin Croft: Customer Marketing Manager, InfluxData
• Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: Solution Architect, InfluxData

Caitlin Croft: 00:00:01.396 And without further ado, I am going to hand things off to Ignacio. So once again, hi, everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar. It’s all about getting up and running with InfluxDB under an hour. Once again, post any questions you may have in the Q&A or the chatbox and we’ll monitor both. My name is Caitlin Croft, and I will hand things off to Ignacio.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:00:30.255 Thank you, Caitlin. Hello, everybody. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. My name is Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck. I am solution architect here at InfluxData, and today, we’re going through a few concepts of InfluxDB Cloud. We’re going through how to ingest data, how to visualize, and how to manage data with Flux. This is the presentation that you are seeing, and the title of this presentation is something that you’re going to start to see a lot when you use InfluxDB. Basically, what we do here is formatting, in line protocol, the name of the presentation. And this is important to understand how you need to share the data for using in InfluxDB, and this is very good example. We have the name of the event. What is the name? That is Cloud New User Training. What is the presenter? One of the presenters is me. My name is Ignacio, again. We’re going through 88 slides. Just joking. It’s not so much slides. And the numbers that you are seeing there is timestamp Unix format. It’s not accurate to today, but it’s an example to how InfluxDB works on [inaudible]. So before I begin, I like to invite you to InfluxDays North America ‘21. It’s between October 26 and 27, 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM Pacific time. We have a running on these days then a bit of training, a hands-on training on Influx.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:02:22.003 And October 25, we have the training [inaudible]. This is a traditional training that we do before InfluxDays, but is part of InfluxDays. In this case, Mike Devy and Ian Clark, my coworkers, is going to help you understand how to work with Telegraf. It’s a free training. I invite everyone to join. And also, we have the main event, InfluxDB InfluxDays, October 26 and 27, Pacific time, 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM. You’re going to see a lot of keynotes. There’s a lot of use cases on how to use InfluxDB, how the companies are using InfluxDB. It’s a free event too, so I invite you to join and to register in this event today. Okay. Let’s begin with the discussion for today. We’re going through a few things that is important to understand how you can do things with InfluxDB Cloud. I’m going to show you how to use the sample data that is available, and it’s a very cool [rapid start?] to using InfluxDB Cloud. We’re going through about what is the possibilities of data ingestion, what is the visualization. We’re going to talk about the Flux on [inaudible], and we’re going to have a very, very light demo time and I want to show you an application that I wrote using the InfluxDB client, Python, to scrap weather data. So I’m going to share with you how - oh, sorry about that. How to create, how to save that application to write data into InfluxDB.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:04:19.000 And we’re going to have 15 minutes of Q&A, so feel free to start to put your questions in the chat, and at the end of the presentation, I’m going to try to answer all the questions. Okay. One of the things that you need to have in mind when you think about InfluxDB is that we provide an end-to-end solution to manage all your information, all your data, right? So basically, you can think of InfluxDB as a platform that provide real-time flexibility of your tags, sensor, and system. So you have three parts, basically. On is the part when you accumulate the information. That information can be events, metrics, [inaudible], and then you can do all the [analytics the same?] with InfluxDB and you can add [price?] on that data through the visualization, [address?], or triggers. One of the thing that I recommend you start to use is the sample data that we have available for InfluxDB Cloud. In this case, it’s SQL [inaudible] sensor data, is data that you can ingest into your InfluxDB instance, and you can start to play with the data and doing aggregation, applying mathematical functions there. It’s very easy to get it started and to practice with the platform without ingesting actual data that maybe you have.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:06:00.845 The other example that we have is related with [inaudible] information that we have. So you can create a task inside of InfluxDB Cloud, and then, after creating a bucket and the tags, you can download that information and start to play with that information too. So again, doing aggregation, mathematical functions, or whatever you want to explore using InfluxDB Cloud. This is sample that are for free. It’s something that’s very easy to accomplish and to start to use InfluxDB Cloud. Okay. Let’s start to talk about that ingestion. We have - sorry. InfluxDB has several ways to ingest data into InfluxDB Cloud. We’re going through a very short explanation of each one. But we have line protocol that, if you remember the [inaudible] slide of this presentation, that was line protocol. We’re going to see more detail about that in a moment. We have the CLI. We have the UI of InfluxDB Cloud. We have the client libraries. The client libraries are very interesting and a very powerful tool. In the demo, I am using one of the client libraries, so stick around to see how these things work or how to easy it is to implement it inside your code. We’re going to talk about Telegraf, their plugins. Telegraf, in case that you don’t know, is our collector that help you to collect information from more than 2,000 plugins, 2,000 sources. And last but not least, we have the cloud API.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:08:01.078 Let’s start to use - so let’s start to work with the line protocol. It’s part of our best practice in terms of schema design. It’s very important to understand how you need to save the data to be ingested by InfluxDB. This is going to be very beneficial and [inaudible] in the future when you have a ton of information and you want that information be available with a performance in mind. So in this case, as I say, InfluxDB use line protocol to write the specific data points, and a point includes a measurement that can be, for example, the CPU data of your server, can include a tag set. You need to think the tag set like the metadata of that data point. For example, the name of the server, the location of the server, or other information that is related to the server and can be useful for doing some organization in the data. And then we have the field. The field, in the case that I mentioned, the one of CPU, can be the usage user or the usage guest that are the fields specific for CPU metrics. And of course, we have timestamp that was expressed in Unix format. But yeah, this is the line protocol. This is something you’re going to see a lot, and this is something that I recommend you understand a little more to create a schema design accordingly to be ingested in InfluxDB.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:09:54.351 Okay. Let’s start to talk about InfluxDB CLI. Influx CLI is a tool starting a few versions ago. [inaudible] separate. You can [inaudible] InfluxDB CLI by separate. You need to [inaudible] InfluxDB to use it. And it’s a very cool tool not only to ingest data but also to manage your InfluxDB Cloud instance, tokens, users, and that kind of things. So it’s very recommended, but also, it’s very useful to start to push data into InfluxDB. If you have, for example, information in line protocol already because you collect the information with other tool or you’re having a CSV, you can use the Influx CLI to push the data into InfluxDB from the command line. Very easy. Very straightforward. The only thing that you need to specify is your token. That is your authentication token, the precision - the precision plug is optional, but the buckets is the database, where is your organization. With a few values, you can start to ingest data through the Influx CLI into InfluxDB Cloud. This is an example. For example, how this work, InfluxDB write the name of our bucket, the organization name, what is the precision, and then we are ingesting line protocol as next line. Maybe this is not very useful, but help us to understand how these things work. We have our measurements, our tag set and the field and also the timestamping, Unix format.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:11:45.029 But what about when we have line protocol in several lines inside our file? You can do it with Influx CLI too. The same, Influx, write the bucket name, the organization, what is the precision. We need to specify the format. In this case, it’s going to be line protocol, and we are going to point to a file that has all the line protocol there. So, very easy. Very straightforward. As I mentioned before, also, you can start to ingest data. In the case that you have all your information in a CSV file, you can ingest using Influx CLI. Again, Influx, write the bucket name, the organization name, the precision. You need to specify the format. In this case, CSV, and you need to point to the file and the CLI is going to do all the magic to get the information into InfluxDB. The other thing that is maybe more easy, if you like a lot the terminal or the CLI, is saving the information using InfluxDB UI. That is the user interface for InfluxDB Cloud. The only thing that you need to do is select your bucket, ping on the bucket - in the case that you never heard the term, “Ping the bucket,” as a database, so you need to select your database, your bucket, and you can use InfluxDB UI to [inaudible] that information with line protocol. And we have CSV also available. But also, you’re going to have a few other options.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:13:30.148 Telegraf agent, when you can start to configure your configuration of the Telegraf, and then the client library. That is something that we’re going to see in a moment. The InfluxDB API client’s libraries. We have our client available in Arduino, C#, Go, Java, Node.js, [inaudible], PHP, Python, R, Ruby, Scala, and Swift. So as you can see, we have a lot of libraries that’s going to help you integrate your application with InfluxDB very easy. We’re going to see - in the demo, we’re going to see a demo using the Python client library. This is very important. This is very cool because it allows you to manage or you get your information, save that information in a way that InfluxDB understand and send that information directly from your application. So you don’t need a specific parts or moving parts that is scraping data from your application. No. You can integrate these client libraries into your application and send the data directly from your application to InfluxDB. So the other part that we have to collect the data, that is the easy way, and it’s very useful when you want to monitor servers or different systems, it’s using Telegraf.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:15:14.825 In the case that you never heard about Telegraf, Telegraf is our collector. It’s the open-source collector, and Telegraf has a lot of improvement from the community that we are very grateful for them because they are adding plugins every month, a lot. You’re going to have - or you’re going to find, sorry, plugins from how to monitor your Windows or your Linux server, SQL server, and other things. [inaudible] with CS:GO server. So if you’re running your CS:GO server to play with friends, you can monitor with Telegraf too. So basically, it’s very easy to get it started. It’s a plugin [inaudible] for collecting metrics. And we have more than 200 plugins already in the GitHub Telegraf [inaudible]. So it’s very interesting. It’s very flexible. If you don’t have the plugin or you don’t find the plugin that you need, [inaudible] you need, it’s very easy to build one plugin for that. But in the case that you don’t have knowledge on Go, you can use the plugin like [inaudible], for example, that is very useful to create - or to trigger Python and Swift or Go and Swift to collect the information that you need. It’s very easy, very straightforward. The other way that we have to collect the information is through the InfluxDB Cloud API.

 

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:16:48.797 You can run HTTP request through the InfluxDB API and through the right endpoint, and you can use the POST request method and you need to include the following in your request: what is the organization, the bucket, the precision, and also, what is the authorization token. And of course, the line protocol, all the information that you want to send through the API. We have a lot of customers already using the API integrated into their application, so they are hitting the API from their application. So as I mentioned before, you don’t need another moving part or another thing to collect the information and send to InfluxDB. You can integrate with the client libraries directly, in your application, the access to the cloud API. This is example of how the API works. You can use the [inaudible] if you want, and the URL is going to depend on your InfluxDB Cloud [inaudible] time, you already have or you already sign up. And also, you can use gzip if you want to use compression. So this is an example, I hope, that is large enough to see the example. But basically, it’s a core [export?] command with the token, the information, in this case, to explain the line protocol.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:18:18.639 And you can see here another example of line protocol. We have the information about the memory in a specific host, and we have the field. In this case, what is the use percent of that memory. In this case, it’s 23%. And we have the timestamp in Unix format. So a little more about Telegraf. Telegraf, as I say, is our collector. It’s the agent for collecting our important metrics, events, logs, and trace. We have more than 200 clients already ready to use with Telegraf. And you can send the information directly from Telegraf to InfluxDB. In this case, you can see here that we have the client libraries and all the architecture and how InfluxDB works [inaudible]. The interesting thing about Telegraf also, it’s not capable of only collecting metrics, it’s capable of doing processing of that information in the client. And this is a good thing because you are delegating the processing of the information to the client, and you don’t need to put more load on the servers. In this case, in InfluxDB Cloud. You can send the information already processed from Telegraf, and you have the information ready to be consumed on InfluxDB Cloud.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:19:56.338 And you have processor like [inaudible], string, and also aggregators like min, mean, max, count, and other [inaudible]. And also you have different outputs. Of course, the most recommended is the InfluxDB or InfluxDB output that is going to point the information that you’re collecting to InfluxDB Cloud, but also, you can write the directly to [inaudible] or another server or another backend that you are using for saving your information. The plugin type of Telegraf are very straightforward. You have the input. That is the clients that collect the metrics from the system services of third-party APIs. But it’s the output, aggregators, and the processors too. Key points when you are using Telegraf, the Telegraf agent must be installed on the client with your infrastructure. So if you are monitoring your Linux server, you need to install Telegraf on that server. So it’s going to collect that information and pump that information into InfluxDB Cloud. A few [inaudible] you need to accomplish for this is you need to add configuration file, and that configuration file can be created using the InfluxDB UI or the Influx CLI, or also, you can create a very custom Telegraf configuration.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:21:35.864 Okay. We’re going to see a little more about how to visualize the information, right? We went through about how to collect the information and how to share the information, now we’re going to jump into the part that - how to visualize that information. And InfluxDB Cloud has some options. Very interesting to do this kind of visualization. One thing, if you never use InfluxDB Cloud, it’s - I don’t like to do comparisons, but it’s something very similar to Grafana, right? So in our case, it’s our visualization tool that is integrated into InfluxDB. So the cool thing is that you don’t need to have a separate thing to manage. So with InfluxDB client, we got [inaudible], and not only you have the server, but also, you have the visualization tool integrated. And also, the other thing, the [inaudible]. But let’s start with talking about the dashboards. The dashboards are something that is very interesting. I really like the dashboards. And you can see my contribution [before to join?] company in the community templates GitHub repository. And there is something - for some people and for some business, it’s very important to have a visualization tool that work accordingly when you have all the information that you need to take [inaudible]. So the dashboard, in this case, help you do that - help you to do that.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:23:24.726 The goal, of course, is visualize the information that is ingesting on InfluxDB Cloud. You can have several type of graph already included in the platform to show the information in [inaudible] way. As you see in the screen show here, we have the single stats, [inaudible], but also, we have gauge, we have graph. It’s very complete in that sense. It’s very powerful enough to analyze historical and future. We have [inaudible] integrated in the tool, so you can use it, and you can do forecasting of the usage of the memory, the CPU, of the data that some sensor is sending to InfluxDB Cloud. And also you can view multiple [relational?] source in a single view. I’m going to show you, in the demo, a little more about the dashboard. Another very cool thing that we have, I really like this feature and I’m going to show you this feature too, is notebooks. Notebooks, basically, is mostly [inaudible] for the teams and specific for collaboration, and the goal is to provide a single consistent building experience in our platform. It’s designed to allow teams to incrementally build queries or background processing tasks together. Also, it’s flexible enough to guide new users and [inaudible] our users, and you can view multiple [relational?] source in a single view.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:25:03.458 It’s something that we’re going to see. We’re going through this in the demo, but it’s a very flexible tool. It’s something that you can play with the information and you can manage and play the information as you want. And one thing that is very cool, a new feature that we are introducing in notebooks, is the possibility to publish this notebook to the public. So if you want to - if you have a set of information that you want to share with your coworkers. but you don’t want to give an access to the notebook for modifying or doing whatever they want to do, you can give them a link to a public view of this dashboard. I’m going to show you how I use this feature that is very cool to me. And also, we have a few things that is related with the dashboards, that we discussed before, and is the dashboard annotation. The dashboard annotation is very cool because you can create a context from specific values in your dashboards. For example, you can see in the screen show that, in this case, we have a spike, and we can send a note that say, “Hey, can you investigate this file?” Or it’s something that inspect, we can send annotation that say, “Okay, this is inspected because we increase our [inaudible] or whatever.”

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:26:54.027 So this is very important because you don’t need a specific talk with your coworkers or with your team trying to explain, so you can leave a note or you can do an annotation in the graph and everybody is going to have a knowledge of what’s going on. You can add, edit, delete note as needed. Very important on [inaudible]. So if you are querying - I don’t know - six months from now, and you have annotation in that period of time, you’re going to see that annotation. So it’s very interesting feature. One of the thing that most customer ask when they start to use InfluxDB Cloud is trying to understand how they are using the platform, right, how they are query, how data is using, how many data is ingesting, right? And we have a dashboard that is created already that you can import very easily and help you to understand all the information. And basically, the goal is to provide self-service access to usage and operation. Usage, for example, how many megabytes I’m ingesting, how many megabytes are consuming, the [inaudible], what is the right [inaudible] events if I have one? What is the right errors if I one - if I have, sorry. And what is the query load? It’s user-configurable templates for [dashboard analytics?], so it’s available on all cloud accounts. In this presentation, it says shortly, but it’s already available to use.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:28:50.803 And so, in the part of utilization, we have the community templates. This is the best path to start fast. It’s very interesting because the community was contributing templates to monitor [inaudible] database, but also, you’re going to find templates that help you to track COVID in your country or in your state or in your province, depends on where you are. So it’s very interesting, You can create a dashboard that is specific for the technology that you manage, and you can export that dashboard to be consumable for other people. So if you’re going to do, for example, system [inaudible], this is the fast and best way to start. So you don’t need to create the dashboard for yourself. You can create from a dashboard that’s already created and then modify if you need it, but it allows you to start with the platform in five minutes or less. This community template was created by a [inaudible]. You can be an example of that. Again, if you know about certain technology [inaudible], you already - or you want to monitor [inaudible] and you don’t find any template, you can export the template and then share with the community. And it’s very interesting because [inaudible] move from the data that you’re pumping into InfluxDB to [inaudible]. [inaudible] the information, in this case, is power, and when you have all this information [inaudible] a dashboard, it can give you an insight and can give you the power to make decision. This is performing like a - this is performing like I want. This is not what’s not happening here and get information very easy using InfluxDB Cloud.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:31:01.374 So a few things that is coming out in terms of that acquisition in Telegraf in the near term, we are looking for - allow to [inaudible] that integration into InfluxDB Cloud. In the case that you are using InfluxDB OSS or you are using another platform, we are looking for solutions that help to you to migrate all that information to InfluxDB Cloud and you can use very easily. In the meantime, we expect to [has?] a could native data ingestion in cloud. In the long term, we are working on [has?] a Telegraf assistant in InfluxDB UI to be very easily to create your own configuration. And we have a few log-in improvements, and of course, we are very close to Telegraf [inaudible]. At this moment, Telegraf is in [inaudible] - in something. I don’t remember exactly, but yeah, we’re working on that part in terms of that acquisition. Okay. The other thing we need to discuss and we need to have our mind at, Flux is a language that you’re going to use when you create the queries and getting the information in [inaudible] visualization or ingesting, again, into your application. And Flux is very powerful. If you ask me, it’s very similar to Python in terms of syntax and how that works. So if you know Python in certain way, it’s going to be familiar, but it’s very easy to understand. It’s very powerful too.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:32:55.319 And the very cool thing that Flux has already is you can connect to several relational database, for example, Postgres, MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, Snowflake or SQLite, Amazon AWS, and others, and you can connect from InfluxDB Cloud and decorate that information that you already have in InfluxDB. So it’s very interesting. It’s very powerful. I recommend you to use. Personally, I don’t use, but I don’t have a relational database in my personal project, right? So that is something that, maybe, I don’t need in my case, but it’s very powerful when we are talking about enterprise data and analytic of information. You can cross information you have in InfluxDB and you have in your relational database. And Flux is very powerful and allows you to do it. The other things that I want to discuss with you today is about how Flux is doing notifications. This notifications endpoint are expanding very widely. Today, we support these logos that we have in the screen, but you can send others to Slack, Teams, Discord, Telegram. I use Telegram a lot. I have a channel. So when one of my server’s going down for some reason, I receive a Telegram message. It’s very cool. But also, you can integrate with [inaudible]. In the case that you don’t know, it’s like a [inaudible] [duty?] of [inaudible]. Our platform for consultation are very useful and very popular between [inaudible] team or DevOps team. But also, you can use Amazon [inaudible] or [inaudible] to trigger alerts.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:35:05.591 Okay. I want to show you a little more about how I use, for a personal project, the InfluxDB client. In my case, it’s the InfluxDB client for Python. And something that we are - I am doing this - I am collecting information about the weather. It’s very interesting because, today, I’m sitting in Seattle, but I am doing a little tour inside of United States, and I am visiting a few cities. Last week, I was in San Francisco. So before this trip, I want to know - I want to understand what is the weather in San Francisco because I’m in Seattle. Today, I’m in Seattle, and the next week, I’m going to stay in another state, right? So a few weeks ago, before I started this trip, I want to know exactly, “Okay, how is the temperature there?” Right? But also, I want to have the temperature of my city, where I live. That is Montevideo, Uruguay. I am from South America. But also, I want the temperature of my home city. That is [inaudible]. That is in Buenos Aires, Argentina. So the thing I am collecting using Python is all this information. I am displaying this information here. As you see, it’s not complete. I am getting the information about the pressure of the weather, the condition, and also the rain, but I already have information about wind speed and the direction but also the temperature of the humidity of the city. And I have a few graph to try to understand, in this case, the last seven days of - okay. We can see that, in Austin, was, a few days ago, 52 Celsius. That is 100 Fahrenheit or something like that, so yeah.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:37:10.424 And I can show you, exactly, the application that I’m using, that I write in Python. It’s very, very simple. As you can see, if you code in Python, this is very familiar for you. I can import a few models. In this case, the model that I use for scrapping all that information is this one, right? And it’s very simple to integrate InfluxDB client for Python. As you can see, I can import into InfluxDB client and import specific components of that client. And then I do all my thing, then my application start to collect the information, right? So it’s collecting variables, and then, in this way, as you can see - let me know if you are not seeing or it’s too small - I can create data points, in this case, that I am pointing to the bucket and I’m doing some tasks, right? What is the location? [inaudible], Montevideo, San Francisco, Seattle. And then I start to write the fields. What is the wind speed? What is the wind orientation? What is the condition? What is the humidity temperature? What is the latitude and the longitude? And this is very cool because you can add a map into InfluxDB Cloud, and you can have all this information in a map from InfluxDB Cloud. So the other thing, once I specify or design my schema, how I want the data to be stored in InfluxDB, I only need to specify that I can write to the API directly. In this case, I write directly with every data point.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:39:07.067 So this is something that is running in Google Cloud. It’s a function that is running every 10 minutes and has the information that you see. The cool thing and the thing that I am using almost every time is this functionality, the notebooks. As I mentioned before, the notebooks is something very useful to start to collaborate with your team, write the queries and get the results that you want. For example, the temperature across the city. That is something that I already show you. But also, if I want the wind speed across the city, I can run this query, and I can have the results here.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:39:56.839 And one of the features that is going to be available for everybody very soon, I am trying and I am using a lot, is this one, that I can share the notebook. So I can share the notebook, and here, this is the public view of the notebook. So in my case, I can go back and set this to presentation mode to only see the data that I want. So I have, in my phone, a shortcut to this. So if I want to see or if I want to understand the temperature of the city that I’m staying, I can share this very easy. I don’t need to log in. I don’t need to do any specific. I can share or I can access to this link from whatever device I have - this is very cool - because you can see [inaudible] is [inaudible] your mobile. It’s very easy to - I am realizing that maybe the code was not seen, right? Maybe somebody can confirm. I was showing the code, but I think that I was sharing only my browser.

Caitlin Croft: 00:41:29.511 We see the dashboard, weather, sunny day, history, refresh every 10 minutes.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:41:35.032 Okay. Let me show this very fast. One more time. So this is the code.

Caitlin Croft: 00:41:41.383 Now we see code.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:41:42.697 Yeah. There we go. That is what I want to show you. I’m so sorry about that. I was explaining something that you are not seeing. I’m so sorry about that. But again, this is the application, and how I’m importing InfluxDB Client into my application, right? I’m using this model to scrap the information, right? If you are an expert in Python, I know that how I did it, maybe, is not the best way, but I want to show you, specifically, how these things work. The cool this is - and also, I have the value from my InfluxDB Cloud instance here. Of course, I delete some of the information for privacy matters, but you can specify your bucket, your organization, your tokens, and your open [weather?] API to scrap all the information from each. As I said before, I run a cloud function in Google Cloud, that’s run every 10 minutes, and I get the data to this dashboard. Okay. I think this is very cool. This maybe is a very simple example, but I show you how much potential the platform has, not only for visualization but also how you can integrate InfluxDB or the clients of InfluxDB into your application or how you can collect the data, in general, when you start to monitor your servers or when you scrap data from other sources. So yeah, basically, it’s all that we got for you today. I am very happy to answer your questions if you have any.

Caitlin Croft: 00:43:43.559 That was awesome, Ignacio. Great job. So I have a question for you. You’ve been using InfluxDB for a while, and you’ve clearly become proficient at it. What are some tips and tricks that you have for people who are just starting out with Influx?

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:44:01.392 Yeah. The first thing that you can do is open an InfluxDB account and then start to play. We have a free [inaudible] that is very easy - that is very easy to use, and yeah, it’s limited in terms of writes and queries you can run off the [potential?] policy, but it’s more than enough to explore and to start to use InfluxDB. That is something that I recommend you. You don’t need to install anything in your server or allocate resources for that. It’s something that is free, it’s going to be free forever, and it’s going to explore the platform. That is my first tip and trick. The other thing that I recommend to you is to start to use Telegraf. Telegraf is the best - if you are not a coder, it’s the best way to start using InfluxDB Cloud. So start monitoring your computer. The same computer you are using to see this webinar right now - you can monitor it very easily using Telegraf and InfluxDB Cloud. So if you want to get into, that is the first thing you can do. And if you are a builder, you can use the InfluxDB Python client or Go or whatever the language that you use to integrate. [inaudible] application. The thing that I did is scraping data from the weather, right? It’s very straightforward. And very straightforward but allow me to understand if I need to get a coat to go out to the house or whatever [inaudible]. So yeah, basically, that is my two or three tips, tricks to get started with InfluxDB Cloud.

Caitlin Croft: 00:45:52.016 And if I am starting out with InfluxDB and I’ve kind of hit a wall, I can’t quite figure out, where are some places that I can go to get more help?

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:46:02.062 Yeah. Very good question. We have a community Slack channel that is very active. I [inaudible] there, answering some questions, so if you have some issues or if you have some questions about InfluxDB Cloud or InfluxDB OSS or Enterprise, in the case that you are an enterprise customer, you can send the question there and somebody in the community is going to help you, pretty sure. We have a very active community, so that is the first place that I would go. But also, we have forums, and I also invite you to engage with us in social media, through Twitter. I am in Twitter too, very active, and LinkedIn too. So if you gave some question, you can tag us in any of that social media, and we’re going to have somebody to help you.

Caitlin Croft: 00:46:55.488 Awesome. Thank you. Well, it doesn’t look like there’s any more questions, but we’ll just stay on here for another minute or so. So if you have any other questions for Ignacio, please feel free to post them in the chat. Don’t be shy. We’re always happy to hear - we’re always happy and here to help. InfluxDB - I think this was a really great training and overview. Once again, we have InfluxDays coming up here in a couple of weeks, and it’s a really fantastic, free event. Ignacio mentioned the Slack channel, and we use the Slack workspace during InfluxDays. Since we can’t meet in person just quite yet, it’s really fun to just get to chat with everyone over Slack. People will post photos of their dogs. Obviously, because it’s InfluxData, there’s jokes around DeLorean and other references to Back to the Future. And then, of course, you can be there getting your questions answered from engineers from InfluxDB as well as other community members who will be online. So it’s really great. Last year, and even in the spring, before even one of us gets a change to answer a question, there’s other community members in there answering each other’s questions as well, so it’s great. All right. Well, thank you, everyone, for joining. Once again, today’s webinar has been recorded and will be made available by tomorrow morning. Thank you, everyone. Have a good day. And thank you, Ignacio.

Ignacio Van Droogenbroeck: 00:48:31.209 Thank you. No, thank you.

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