InfluxDB — Scalable Time Series Datastore for Metrics & Events

What InfluxDB Does

• Time series storage — optimized for time-ordered data
• High write throughput — millions of points per second
• Downsampling — continuous queries / tasks to roll up data
• Retention policies — auto-delete old data
• SQL + InfluxQL + Flux — multiple query languages
• Apache Arrow/Parquet — columnar storage in v3
• Unlimited cardinality — v3 removes series cardinality limits
• Telegraf — 200+ plugins for data collection
• Kapacitor — alerting and stream processing
• Grafana integration — first-class data source

Architecture

InfluxDB 3.0 architecture:

• Write — line protocol to WAL, flushed to Parquet files
• Query — DataFusion execution engine on Parquet + in-memory WAL
• Storage — object storage (S3, local disk) for Parquet
• Compactor — merges small Parquet files into larger ones

Self-Hosting

# docker-compose.yml
version: "3"
services:
  influxdb:
    image: influxdb:3-core
    ports: ["8086:8086"]
    volumes: ["influx-data:/var/lib/influxdb3"]
    environment:
      INFLUXDB3_NODE_IDENTIFIER_PREFIX: "node-1"
      INFLUXDB3_OBJECT_STORE: "file"
      INFLUXDB3_DB_DIR: "/var/lib/influxdb3"
volumes:
  influx-data:

Key Features

• Purpose-built for time series
• v3 built on Apache Arrow/Parquet
• SQL and InfluxQL query
• Unlimited cardinality (v3)
• High ingest throughput
• Downsampling and retention
• Telegraf ecosystem (200+ plugins)
• Grafana integration
• Cloud-native managed offering

Comparison

FAQ

Q: v2 vs v3 differences? A: v3 is a complete rewrite (Rust + Apache Arrow/DataFusion), supporting SQL, with no cardinality limits and storage placed on object storage. v2 uses Go + the TSM engine and has cardinality issues.

Q: How do I choose between this and Prometheus? A: Prometheus is better for monitoring (pull model, simple deployment); InfluxDB is better for general-purpose time series data (push model, SQL queries, longer retention).

Q: Does it support PromQL? A: v3 has experimental PromQL support, aiming to be a Prometheus alternative.

Sources

• Docs: https://docs.influxdata.com
• GitHub: https://github.com/influxdata/influxdb
• License: Apache 2.0