NOTE Since I have written this article, all the components used in this below architecture have gone through many updates and releases. While the general premise involving influxdb-relay and the multiplexing might still hold, please sync up with the latest release docs before jumping into some serious system design.

Currently, from version 0.9, you cannot create an InfluxDB cluster from the open-sourced free edition. Only commercially available InfluxDB Enterprise can do that for now. That stirred up the early-adopter enthusiast users, especially for their usage in professional setups. They complained that InfluxData, the company behind InfluxDB, is trying to milk the OSS solution for profit.

Archiving isn't easy ... tobias-fischer-PkbZahEG2Ng

I can’t blame the InfluxData guys much, as they got to pay their bills too. So far, we — the users of open-source systems — couldn’t show much promise about the financial realities of the projects. Continuing development of OSS products, by only depending on donations, patrons, or enterprise sponsorship, is far too rare and unpredictable, even for the projects that many successful organizations heavily rely on.

Anyways, InfluxDB then promised and later introduced Influx Relay as a complimentary consolation for missing HA parts of InfluxDB. You can get the details here and here about that.

Premise

For my needs, I have to try to create a reliable HA(High-Availability) setup from available free options, hence InfluxDB and the relay. It’s quite a bit far from an InfluxDB-cluster in terms of robustness or ease of setup, but it’s got the job done, at least for me.

I needed a setup to receive system-stats from at least 500+ instances and to store them for a while, but without breaking the bank in bills from AWS. Meaning, I could ask for and could use only couple of instances for my solution.

Here were my trade-offs.

  • Not too many instances for this purpose. Neither, any of the heavyweight lifters e.g. AWS’ m3-xlarge etc. To use only what’s necessary.
  • To satisfy the budget, hence avoiding pay-per-use solutions as far as it is possible.
  • Solutions must not be crazy complex, so that handover to the DevOps team be smooth.
  • Reading the data would be too rarely w.r.t. writing. The related Grafana dashboards will be only used to investigate issues by a handful of people.

Overall Design

Write

From a birds’ eye view, I decided to use two server instances to run parallelly, hosting InfluxDB on them independently and then sending the same data over to them for storing. This scheme mostly looks like RAID-1 systems.

Overall architecture

That brings up a couple of challenges.

  • None of the agents I used on the sender side could multiplex output. That means, they were able to send data to a single destination, not multiple. On the Windows front, I’ve used Telegraf which is able randomly to switch between pre-listed destinations, but NOT multiple at-once.
    In the case of Linux hosts, I used Netdata which is excellent in its own right, but unable to send stats to multiple destinations.
    Here comes Influx-relay. It can receive time-series data-stream from hosts on a TCP or UDP port, buffer for a while, and then re-send those received and buffered data to multiple receive ends which can either be an InfluxDB instance or another listening Influx-relay instances.
    This chaining can broaden the relaying scheme even further. However, for my purpose, this relay-chaining was not necessary. Rather, from the relay, I am sending data to the separate InfluxDB instances, running on two separate instances.

  • Now that I partially multiplexed the output, my hosts (senders) still are able to send to one destination. So, I need a proxy as well as a load-balancer. For a while, I was torn between NGINX and HAProxy. Both were new to me.

However, for a couple of reasons, I went for HAProxy. Firstly, I don’t need HTTP session management. Secondly, as I wanted to keep my UDP for later, HAProxy was perfectly capable of that.
NGINX has the support recently, but the maturity was a concern. Also, configuring NGINX seems a little intimidating (which I know might not be so true). Last but not least, and for what it’s worth, out-of-the-box, HAProxy’s stat page carries much more in-depth information than that of free-version of NGINX.
Upon receiving the stats stream, HAProxy was supposed to send that to different Influx-relays in a load-balanced fashion.

So, here’s my rough plan.

collector-agent → HAProxy → (50/50 load-balanced) → Influx-relay → (multiplexed) → 2 InfluxDB instances

Now, each one of the received data is to go to both of the InfluxDB instances, or at least to one in case of failure (or, overload per se) of any the relays or Influx instances.   Also, I have chosen to keep Influx-relays deployed as Dockerized and kept HAProxy and InfluxDB instances running as native services. Of course, you can Dockerize HAProxy and InfluxDB, too.

Read

As I’ve already noted in the section that reading the data, meaning to fetch data to visualize on Grafana end, will happen rarely and sporadically; only to investigate alarms or any other client-side performance issues.

So, the read requests, reaching the HAProxy end, needed not much routing, other than directly to InfluxDB itself. Still, to better distribute the load I decided to load-balance it 50/50 basis.

Ports

  • As all the READ requests are routed through HAProxy running on each of the instances, to the external world only HAProxy’s port should be opened for this purpose.
  • On the other hand, for WRITE requests, InfluxDBs are receiving data from relays, one of its own instance and another one on other instance, so InfluxDB should listen on its own port for WRITE requests only. But, this must be accessible only from own VPS zone, but not open to the outside world.
  • In case of HAProxy as well as InfluxDB, you can use the default ports, obviously, which is 8086 & 8088 respectively. Or, you can choose to go for other ports (security through obfuscation). Your call. In this writing, I’ll go with the defaults.

Authentication, SSL

You can configure SSL with your own server certificates through the HAProxy configs. You can even go for SSL from the relays to InfluxDB writes. If your sender hosts are connecting to your HAProxy through public internet, you should at least go for password-based authentication, better to utilize SSL. However, for brevity’s sake, I’ll skip them in this post.

**Note: * Please bear in mind, this is an “in-progress” post; prematurely published to force me to work on it. I have the plan to add all the necessary configurations & commands, that I used, here.