October 1-3, 2019
Bespoke / San Francisco, CA
InfluxDays San Francisco 2019 was a great event and we all had a blast! In case you missed it, here is a list of the conference sessions and links to their talks.
PAUL DIX
Founder and CTO, InfluxData
@pauldix
Where Flux and InfluxDB Are Headed
Paul will talk about the long-term vision for Flux the language as well as InfluxDB 2.0, Telegraf 2.0 and beyond. He’ll talk about why we’ve decided to create a language, how that plays into polyglot persistence & purpose-built time series databases, and how it enables more complex analytics and processing workloads to drive insights from data not just in InfluxDB, but everywhere.
About Paul Dix: Paul Dix is the creator of InfluxDB. He has helped build software for startups, large companies and organizations like Microsoft, Google, McAfee, Thomson Reuters, and Air Force Space Command. He is the series editor for Addison Wesley’s Data & Analytics book and video series. In 2010 Paul wrote the book Service-Oriented Design with Ruby and Rails for Addison Wesley’s. In 2009 he started the NYC Machine Learning Meetup, which now has over 7,000 members. Paul holds a degree in computer science from Columbia University.
Russ Savage
Director of Product Management, InfluxData
@RussellSavage
How to Build a Monitoring Application in 20 Minutes
This talk will show how to use Tasks, Flux, dashboards and monitoring and alerting in InfluxDB 2.0 to create an external service or website monitor. It’ll tie all the work we’ve been doing for the last two years together in a simple example for everyone to use as a template for their own custom monitoring applications built on top of the InfluxDB 2.0 platform.
About Russ Savage: Russ Savage is Director of Product Management at InfluxData where he focuses on enabling DevOps for teams using InfluxDB and the TICK Stack. He has a background in computer engineering and has been focused on various aspects of enterprise data for the past 10 years. Russ has previously worked at Cask Data, Elastic, Box, and Amazon. When Russ is not working at InfluxData, he can be seen speeding down the slopes on a pair of skis.
Tim Hall
VP of Products, InfluxData
Getting Ready to Move to InfluxDB 2.0
This talk will go into the details of migrating from TICK to InfluxDB 2.0. We’ll touch on data migration, what to consider when migrating dashboards from InfluxQL to Flux, and considerations for moving from Kapacitor and TICKscript to Tasks and Flux.
About Tim Hall: Tim is a seasoned executive responsible for products, support, and professional services at InfluxData. Prior to joining InfluxData, Tim was VP of product management at Hortonworks where he was responsible for leading the product management, documentation, and user experience design teams. Previously, Tim held management level positions at Oracle, HP, Talking Blocks, and Xpedior. Tim holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Claremont McKenna College in Science and Management with a concentration in Physics.
Machine Learning Engineer, ING Bank Netherlands
Transitioning Diagnostics from an Expert-First to a Metrics-First Approach
The team of Mortgages inside ING Bank Netherlands has experienced a transition from a pure knowledge- and experience-based diagnostic of anomalies in their production environment, to a metrics-first approach enabled by InfluxDB.
This talk will describe our learning path in the platform, the cultural challenges of a mature organization facing new processes, and the benefits of resourcing to data to reduce our Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR) in practice.
About Herminio Vazquez: Herminio works as a consultant in the Mortgages tribe splitting his time between operation and data-related challenges.
In his career Herminio has already worked in more than 40 countries, in all continents, and lived in 12. His career was shaped along the lines of General Electric Nuclear Energy in San Jose, CA, with a devotion to innovation and quality for mission critical applications. In his professional path, he has run through the implementation of testing and data solutions for a variety of industries and systems.
Today, established in Valencia (Spain), he splits his time between his family, friends and nature.
Senior Director of Product Management, InfluxData
Software Engineer, InfluxData
Monitoring and Alerting with InfluxDB 2.0
In this talk we’ll go over the new UI and API in InfluxDB 2.0 to create complex monitoring, alerting and notification rules. We’ll start with the easy on-ramp via the user interface and then dig into how the setup and management of monitoring and alerting can be driven through code and the API.
About Nate Isley: Nate Isley is an experienced Senior Director of Product Management with a demonstrated history of leading PM teams to bring innovative software to market. He is skilled in Enterprise Software, SaaS, Sales, Application Performance Management and Agile Methodologies. He has an MBA from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business.
About Deniz Kusefoglu: Deniz graduated with a degree in Mathematics from the University of Chicago, and began her graduate studies in Computational Neuroscience at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and the Vollum Institute. Her graduate work was data analysis intensive and resulted in two publications, one in the prestigious journal Neuron. During spring of 2017, she attended the Recurse Center in NYC and focused on learning how to build applications in JavaScript and Python. She now works on the applications team at InfluxData, building out visualization and UI elements to InfluxDB applications.
VP of Innovation, Grafana
Streaming Sensor Data with Grafana and InfluxDB
In this session, Ryan will preview the new streaming and shared query support in Grafana. He will show how you can visualize high-resolution real-time sensor streams using InfluxDB and Grafana.
About Ryan McKinley: Ryan McKinley is the VP of Innovation at Grafana Labs. Previously he was the lead at Watershed OS, the CTO at Voyager Search and has been an active committer to Lucene/Solr (a part of the Apache Foundation) for the last 14 years. He has an MS degree from MIT and a BS degree from UC San Diego.
Allison Wang
Software Engineer, Robinhood
How Robinhood Built a Real-Time Anomaly Detection System to Monitor and Mitigate Risk
Robinhood is democratizing the financial systems by offering commission-free investing and trading with the use of your phone or desktop. As exciting as that sounds to the outside world, internally, the team at Robinhood must understand the different risk vectors and build engineering solutions to mitigate these risks. In this talk, Allison will talk about how they build a real-time risk monitoring system with InfluxDB and Faust, an open-source Python stream processing library. She will review the architecture behind the system which will involve both the time series anomaly detection part (InfluxDB) and the real-time stream processing part (Faust/Kafka).
About Allison Wang: Allison Wang is a software engineer at Robinhood, a U.S.-based financial services company that helps consumers invest in stocks, ETFs, options, and cryptocurrencies, all commission-free, right from their phone. As a financial services company, risk and fraud are areas of great concern so engineers like Allison work on developing monitoring strategies to check for financial risks and anomaly detection. She has a wide range of front-end engineering from companies like Airbnb, Expii, and Twitter and has a degree from Carnegie Mellon in Computer Science.
While the software solutions teams are involved in delivering projects around the globe, Albert is working with the engineers who are part of the device teams to further strengthen the market position of Worldsensing’s wireless monitoring system, Loadsensing. With over 30,000 deployments across 50 countries, Loadsensing is the globally leading system used to monitor risks at critical infrastructures such as tunnel construction projects and mines.
Developer Advocate, InfluxData
The Telegraf Toolbelt: It Can Do That, Really?
Telegraf is an agent for collecting, processing, aggregating, and writing metrics. With over 200 plugins, Telegraf can fetch metrics from a variety of sources, allowing you to build aggregations and write those metrics to InfluxDB, Prometheus, Kafka, and more.
In this talk, we will take a look at some of the lesser known, but awesome, plugins that are often overlooked; as well as how to use Telegraf for monitoring of Cloud Native systems.
About David Flanagan: David Flanagan, born and bred in Glasgow (Scotland), is a Developer Advocate for InfluxData. As a serial user-group organiser, founding Cloud Native, Docker, DevOps, MongoDB, Observability, and Pair Programming Glasgow, David is always searching for new and creative ways to share knowledge with others.
David was an early adopter of container technologies, deploying his first Docker container to production in 2014. Since then, David has embraced the Cloud Native landscape; encouraging developers to adopt the right tools and languages for the job, rather than those within their comfort zone.
Jacob Marble
Software Engineer, InfluxData
The InfluxDB 2.0 Storage Engine
The InfluxDB storage engine was completely overhauled for 2.0. Jacob will walk through why we made these changes and discuss architectural considerations in using the new TSM engine.
InfluxDB 101 – Concepts and Architecture
Complete introduction to time series, the components of InfluxDB, how to get started, and how to think of your metrics problems with the InfluxDB platform in mind. What is a tag, and what is a value? Come and find out!
About Michael DeSa: Michael DeSa is a Software Engineer at InfluxData who focuses on increasing the performance capabilities of InfluxDB. He has led the InfluxDB training course across the US, providing students with an in depth understanding of how InfluxDB works as well as sharing best practices. He has a degree in Math, with a focus on Abstract Algebra, from the University of California, at Berkeley and was an Instructor of the Web Development Immersive series at General Assembly in San Francisco.
Nathaniel Cook
Member of Technical Staff, InfluxData
Increasing Reuse and Time to Awesome by Using Flux Packages
This talk will show how to develop your own packages in Flux and publish them to the public package repository. We’ll show the development and testing workflow along with the tools for iterating and releasing new versions of a package.
About Nathaniel Cook: Nathaniel is the leader of the Kapacitor Project at InfluxData. Nathaniel started his career as an operations engineer, trying to make data do the hard work of monitoring and managing large scale SaaS products. Along the way he learned some data science and machine learning and put them to use detecting anomalies in time series data. Nathaniel holds an MS degree from University of Illinois.
Christoph Bussler
Solutions Architect, Google, Inc.
IoT Event Processing and Analytics with InfluxDB in Google Cloud
The presentation introduces a Google Cloud native architecture for collecting, processing, analyzing and archiving of events from IoT devices, vehicles as well as upstream software systems. InfluxDB and its connection to global native Google Cloud services like BigQuery or Cloud Machine Learning Engine as well as Kubernetes is at the center of the architecture. The architecture demonstrates how access to global scaling cloud services addresses use cases from the Energy Sector.
Adam AnthonyDeveloper, InfluxData
Extending Flux to Support Other Databases and Data Stores
Flux was designed to work across databases and data stores. In this talk, Adam will walk through the steps necessary for you to add your own database or custom data source to Flux.
Scaling Prometheus Metrics in Kubernetes with Telegraf
Scaling Prometheus in Kubernetes seems easy with service-discovery, but quickly devolves into manual DevOps snowflake setup. Additionally, a single developer is able to overwhelm a federated Prometheus setup and impact the system as a whole without being able to self-service debug. In this talk, Chris will focus on a variety of architectures using Telegraf to scale scraping in Kubernetes and empower developers. He’ll describe his experiences around scaling /metrics in the microservices of InfluxData’s Cloud 2.0 Kubernetes system…as he was the single developer that added just one more label…
About Chris Goller: As an Architect with 20 years of experience, Chris Goller brings tremendous energy and expertise to InfluxData. In particular, Chris likes to try out using new technologies and sharing his learnings with the staff at InfluxData as well as with the community.
How to Deliver a Critical and Actionable Customer-Facing Metrics Product with InfluxDB
In IoT, understanding the health of thousands of devices is critical for deployment at scale especially when troubleshooting an issue. Particle’s customer base needed visibility into their devices with actionable data to reference in real time. Join Cullen Murphy, Site Reliability Engineer at Particle, to learn how the team built a metrics system on Telegraf, Kubernetes, and Prometheus to deploy a customer-facing product that provides critical and relevant data to their IoT product creators.
About Cullen Murphy: Cullen Murphy is a Site Reliability Engineer at Particle, a global IoT platform helping developers deploy connected hardware and software solutions. Cullen is responsible for ensuring the Particle Server infrastructure is accessible and scaling seamlessly for customers. Prior to Particle, Cullen was Lead Software Engineer at Apruve where he drove architecture and implementation of major software design and server systems to prepare for scale with organizational growth. Finding himself back where he started, Cullen began his career in embedded hardware and IoT design and deployment.
Tim Hall
VP of Products, InfluxData
Lessons Learned: Running InfluxDB Cloud and Other Cloud Services at Scale
In this session, Tim will cover principles, learnings, and practical advice from operating multiple cloud services at scale, including of course our InfluxDB Cloud service. What do we monitor, what do we alert on, and how did we architect it all? What are our underlying architectural and operational principles?
About Tim Hall: Tim is a seasoned executive responsible for products, support, and professional services at InfluxData. Prior to joining InfluxData, Tim was VP of product management at Hortonworks where he was responsible for leading the product management, documentation, and user experience design teams. Previously, Tim held management level positions at Oracle, HP, Talking Blocks, and Xpedior. Tim holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Claremont McKenna College in Science and Management with a concentration in Physics.
Testing and Monitoring and Broken Things
As a small startup team of developers, release engineering and quality assurance was inherently problematic. To optimize these processes, Sensu implemented a full automated test infrastructure for staging and end-to-end testing, which later became known as the QA Crucible. To increase observability on the overall ecosystem, Nikki started to research the intersection of monitoring and testing in a CI/CD pipeline, and sought to implement existing tooling to further optimize the workflow. By instrumenting JSON test results within a monitoring solution, she discovered a major upside to how tests are run, visualized, responded to, and remediated. Not only can tests be run continuously, but results can also be routed through an event pipeline for data manipulation, visibility and alerting. This pattern allows operators to treat test failures as incidents, and persists test results as metrics in a time-series database for analysis. This technology stack uses RSpec for automated tests, Sensu as an event pipeline, InfluxDB for metric storage, and Grafana for visual dashboards.
Noah Crowley
DevRel, InfluxData
@noahcrowley
InfluxData Architecture for IoT
Noah will walk you through a typical data architecture for an IoT deployment: from sensor to edge to cloud. Then, it will be a hands-on demo to gather data from the device, display it on a dashboard and trigger alerts.
About Noah Crowley: Noah is a Developer Evangelist at InfluxData, focused on DevOps with a dash of IoT. He has worked as a systems administrator, audio engineer, production coordinator for an animation studio, and as a software developer building DevOps tools. Noah holds a master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where he focused on augmented reality, physical computing, and interaction design.
Craig Hobbs
Sales Engineer, InfluxData
@chobbs10
InfluxDB Enterprise Architectural Patterns
Craig will discuss architecture patterns with InfluxDB Enterprise, covering an overview of InfluxDB Enterprise, features, ingestion and query rates, deployment examples, replication patterns, and general advice.
About Craig Hobbs: Craig Hobbs is a Sales Engineer at InfluxData. His experience with keeping systems performant over the years has helped to shape the kind of Sales Engineer he is today—one who enjoys solving complex problems and keeping sales people honest. His specialties include: Solution Architect, Project Management, POC Design and Development, Software Customization, Technical Training, ETL Automation, Application Integration and Deployment. Craig has a BS from the University of Illinois.
Optimizing InfluxDB Performance in the Real World
Sam will provide practical tips and techniques learned from helping hundreds of customers deploy InfluxDB and InfluxDB Enterprise. This includes hardware and architecture choices, schema design, configuration setup, and running queries.
About Sam Dillard: Sam Dillard is a Sales Engineer at InfluxData. He is passionate about making customers successful with their solutions as well as continuously updating his technical skills. Sam has a BS in Economics from Santa Clara University.
Development and Applications of Distributed IoT Sensors for Intermittent Connectivity Environments
What do electric power sensing IoT devices, large area electric field surveys and an array with hundreds of data channels have in common? They’re all built using an IoT stack fueled by InfluxDB and designed to run in environments of intermittent network connectivity.
In the operational environments where U.S. Soldiers operate, network connectivity is not ensured due to jamming, intermittent 4G signals, or paperwork. To address these issues, the United States Army Research Laboratory runs InfluxDB in both the cloud and on the IoT device. When connectivity is available, the most recent data are replicated to the cloud with historical data replicated as possible. This allows them to design products that can leverage the cloud, but aren’t tied to it. As a result, they have been able to develop electric power monitors for installations and microgrids, strap sensors to vehicles for large area surveys, and combine sensors into arrays.
About Kevin Claytor: Dr. Kevin Claytor is a physicist working with electric and magnetic fields at the US Army Research Laboratory since 2015. He has architected an IoT device infrastructure that allows for reliable data replication in intermittent connectivity environments. He has used this for wide-area field surveys, and in the creation of a many hundred element sensing array. Other members of his team use the same infrastructure to monitor electric power consumption to improve efficiency and reduce fuel consumption. He is also leading the application of AI / ML algorithms and techniques to this data. Prior to that he earned his Ph.D. in Physics at Duke University under the guidance of Prof. Warren S. Warren. There his research was focused on Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and Magnetic resonance imaging, in particular the study of “long lived singlet states”. He demonstrated characterization of these states in non-isotopically labeled molecules.
When Holt-Winters is Better Than ML
ML gets a lot of hype, but its statistical predecessors are still immensely powerful, especially in the time series space. Error, trend, seasonality forecast (ETS), autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), and Holt-Winters are three classical methods that are not only incredibly popular but also excellent time series predictors. In fact, these classical methods outperform several other ML methods including long short-term memory (LTSM) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) in one-step forecasting.
InfluxDB Client Libraries and Applications
InfluxDB comes with a new set of client libraries to allow you to insert time series data from your applications into the new InfluxDB 2.0. In this session, Miroslav will walk you through how to use the new client library to access InfluxDB 2.0.
About Miroslav Malecha: Miroslav Malecha is Director of Product management at Bonitoo.io. He has a background in computer science and has been focused on defining software products in data science, enterprise architectures and cloud computing. Prior to joining Bonitoo, Miroslav held product management positions at Good Data and Hewlett-Packard Software. When Mirek is not working, you can find him speeding down hills on his ebike in the forests near Prague.
Katy Farmer
DevRel, InfluxData
@TheKaterTot
Creating and Using the Flux SQL Datasource
This talk introduces the SQL data source for Flux. It will start with examples of using data from MySQL or Postgres with time series data from InfluxDB. It will then go over the details of how the SQL data source was created.