Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

In this post, we learn how to use tasks in combination with checks for monitoring with InfluxDB.

The five-day period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday is known as the Cyber Five Weekend (also known as Cyber 5). Forbes estimates that people spent $3.7 billion on Thanksgiving Day in 2018. They approximate that over 165 million people shopped over the entire weekend. This is a 16.5% increase year over year. On Black Friday, people spent $6.2 billion online, with a 23.6% year-over-year growth.

Our Telegraf Starlark Processor Plugin is an exciting new processor in Telegraf 1.15 that gives you the flexibility of performing various operations in Telegraf using the Starlark language. What is Starlark, you ask? Starlark (formerly known as Skylark) is a language intended for use as a configuration language. Starlark is a dialect of Python. Like Python, it is a dynamically typed language with high-level data types, first-class functions with lexical scope, and garbage collection.

Last week we released Telegraf 1.15 with new plugins for network monitoring and a large number of processors to help with your data ingestion. All packages were written in Go 1.14.5. This all couldn’t have been done without the 50+ community members who contributed to writing plugins, fixing bugs, reviewing code, and everything else to help make Telegraf better! Here’s a quick look into new plugins and features we launched in Telegraf 1.15.

I recently spoke with Alex Skrivseth, the Operations Manager at The Shed App, and discovered how he’s using InfluxDB to monitor the current levels of gas and diesel at various gas stations. Simply by extracting IoT sensor data, he has been able to provide valuable previously inaccessible data to fuel truck drivers.

According to Forbes, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day. Data volumes have grown exponentially in recent years due to the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and sensors. The majority of data collected has been collected in the last two years alone. For example, the U.S. generates over 2.5 million gigabytes of Internet data every minute, and over half of the world’s online traffic comes from mobile devices.

Today, InfluxDB Cloud is generally available on Microsoft Azure. Now you have the freedom to run the leading time series database on whichever you prefer: Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud or AWS.

SAN FRANCISCO — July 22, 2020 — InfluxData, creator of the time series database InfluxDB, today announced that InfluxDB Cloud is now available on Microsoft Azure, furthering the company’s commitment to increase accessibility to developers. With this announcement, InfluxDB Cloud is now live on all three major cloud platforms — Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services.

Our team recently discovered an exposed endpoint without authentication enabled, though we know it had previously been required. The root cause was a missing configuration as a result of a recent upgrade a few weeks earlier, and was easy to fix by simply enabling the configuration parameter correctly. We needed a way to catch this type of issue quickly going forward, for this and for other public endpoints, which should be secure by default. Here is how we solved it.

We’re excited about today’s release of Grafana 7.1, which extends Grafana’s built-in InfluxDB datasource to run queries in both the Flux language and InfluxQL. This means it’s super easy to connect Grafana to InfluxDB — whether you use InfluxDB 1.8 or 2.0, Flux or InfluxQL. Because this InfluxDB datasource is built into Grafana 7.1, there is no separate plugin to download and install.