A time series is a sequence of data points, typically consisting of successive measurements made over a time interval. Examples of time series are ocean tides, counts of sunspots, and the daily closing value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

What does that mean intuitively? It means that if you were to plot the points on a graph, one of your axis would always be time.

It also bears pointing out that there are two major types of time-series data:

• Regular – data that is sampled at regular intervals. For example every second, or every hour.
• Irregular – for example, data that is only recorded when an event occurs, which might happen frequently, but always at completely random times.

Sending Data to InfluxDB with Telegraf

What is Telegraf?

It’s the “T” in the TICK stack. Telegraf is an open source agent written in Go for collecting metrics and data on the system it’s running on or from other services. Telegraf then writes the data to InfluxDB in the correct format.

Key features include:

• MIT License
• Minimal memory footprint
• Extensible plugin design with 40+ input and output plugins
• Support for datasources like MongoDB, MySQL and Redis
• Messaging systems like Apache Kafka and RabbitMQ
• Third party APIs like Mailchimp, AWS CloudWatch and Google Analytics
• Collect system metrics like CPU, Memory, I/O, etc