0:05 Introduction and Overview

0:05 Hello, and welcome to tutorial two part three of the complete gate to InfluxDB two. Today, we're gonna take a look at what happens after you first install or run InfluxDB. We're going to run through the setup and do a high level exploration of the user interface and the different components just to give you enough that you can start to experiment and play with InfluxDB on your own. So let's get started. Now I have just run InfluxD like we did on the previous lesson. Only I have not started on get started yet, which we have to do now.

0:39 Initial InfluxDB Setup (Admin User, Org, Bucket)

0:49 The thing that's important here is that InfluxDB two does not allow you to run or operate it without configuring your first admin user. Authentication cannot be disabled. You have to provide a username, a secure password, preferably not password one two three, followed by an organization name and a bucket name. Let's talk about that. InfluxDB two point is multi tenant by default and that your data, dashboards, your metrics can all be separated by organisations. For today, I will create an organisation called Rawkode. Then we have buckets. So we have to create our first bucket as part of our organisation.

1:45 And buckets can be thought of like databases in your more traditional database system. Buckets and a time series database, specifically InfluxDB, have retention policies. So you use buckets as a way to determine when data within that bucket should automatically be expired. For today, we will call this tutorial. That is us set up. We could now log out and log back in if we really wanted. So InfluxDB has a few different options that allow you to get started. You can go through some local metric collections. You can start to specify and configure Telegraph, or you could just say, I will do

2:28 this later, which is what we're going to choose now. So this is the user interface and this is the getting started page. We can use the load your data, build a dashboard, or set up alerting buttons to get, well, to get started on each of those tasks. What we're gonna do first is just take a look at the data tab. So InfluxDB has really great support across all of these different client libraries and Telegraph plugins to start getting metrics into your system. So it doesn't matter what your stack is in your organization. There is a pretty good chance that you

2:44 Data Tab Overview

3:04 can get data into your InfluxDB two instance pretty quickly. We can click on buckets and we see our bucket here, our tutorial one was created with a retention policy of forever. This means that any data that we write to the tutorial bucket will never be expired. Let's just create one more bucket and we'll call this five ms and the shortest retention policy is one hour, so we'll call it one hour and we will click create. You can see now we have our one hour bucket with our retention policy of one hour. Now, what happens here is InfluxDB runs compactions

3:10 Buckets

3:47 at a regular interval and we'll look for shards within each of these buckets that are older than the time that we allow through retention policy and also be automatically deleted for us. In future episodes of this course, we'll be looking at how to downsample and change the resolution of our data to allow us to move it between buckets that we can have high frequency, high resolution data that lives for a short amount of time and then aggregate it into other buckets which live for a longer amount of time. We talked about this briefly in the very first part of this course,

4:18 an introduction to time series. So stay tuned for that video. The Telegraph UI allows us to very quickly create a Telegraph configuration. We can click on the components that we have in our system and it will actually, if we click continue, allow us to configure where our Docker socket is. For Kubernetes, we can specify the URL. Not the right port, but it's okay. For NGINX, and this does require your NGINX to have the stats plugin enabled. We configure Redis. Now I'm not going to do all of these because we don't need them all. What I'm going to do is

4:23 Telemetry

5:04 disable these. We'll have our system. We'll select the one hour bucket and click continue. And we could give this a name. We'll just call this system monitoring. This now gives us an InfluxDB token that we can export to our environment. And a really cool feature of Telegraph that we haven't covered yet, and we will be in the next video in a bit more detail, is the remote configuration where you can specify the URL to pull your Telegraph config. We can click finish here. Now the alternative approach if you don't want to use the remote configuration is to click on this one

5:45 more time, and you can download it or copy and paste it. And you'll see this is the TOML required for each of the plugins that we use. Now you will still have to export your Influx token to your environment for this configuration to work. Next, we have scrapers. So InfluxDB has built in support for fetching metrics from remote endpoints. This works really well for Prometheus endpoints that you have available where you want to be able to scrape them on a regular cadence, but we're not going to be using that today. Lastly, on the data tab, we have the

6:01 Scrapers and Tokens (Data Tab Features)

6:19 ability to manage our tokens. This is my initial admin token that was created when I created the user, and this is my generated token for the Influx config that we generated through the UI. Next, we have the Explore tab. From here, we can begin to explore the metrics that we have in our system. Now, we don't have any metrics because we're not collecting anything yet, but we will be covering using the Explore API and Avedio validation. Next, have boards, which allows us to visualise our data. Now, because we generated our first Telegraph configuration through the UI, this dashboard was added automatically.

6:51 Boards (Dashboards) Tab

7:02 Now if I were to begin running Telegraph, we would see metrics and visualizations begin to come in here. The next tab we have is tasks. We will be spending a significant amount of effort playing with tasks over the next week or two because it's key to the way that we work with downsampling and alerting our InfluxDB system. Tasks allow us to write flux scripts that can fetch and manipulate the data within our database and use them to drive decisions and automations in our infrastructure. The next workshop will be this week, and it will be focusing on writing your first

7:09 Tasks Tab (Flux & Automation)

7:38 flux. Make sure to catch that. Next, have the alerts tab. The alerts tab allows us to then use our metrics to be able to trigger notifications to Slack, email, HTTP endpoints, and more, so that we can understand and trigger pagers, send Slack messages, just get someone's attention when we have an anomaly within our system. And lastly, we have our settings tab. InfluxDB allows us to define variables that can be used in our Flux scripts. You can see here that the variable can be of type query, map, or CSV. So there's multiple ways to provide static values

8:05 Settings Tab (Variables, Templates, Labels)

8:20 or dynamic values from a query to your Flux tasks and queries. One of the coolest things about InfluxDB's latest version, version two, is templates. We will be spending also a significant amount of time on using the GetOps pattern to apply our telegraph configurations, our dashboards and our tasks using InfluxDB two templates. But we won't be looking at this today, but we will have a really cool video on that coming soon. And lastly, we have the ability to manage our labels. Labels can be applied to any dashboard and task, notebook, etcetera. Cool feature. It just helps us manage

8:28 Templates

9:03 and structure the resources that we have available in our InfluxDB two system. So that's again in CertiKate. Stay tuned. There'll be more videos coming really soon. I'll speak to you later. Have a great day.