This is archived documentation for InfluxData product versions that are no longer maintained. For newer documentation, see the latest InfluxData documentation.
In the 0.9.x version of InfluxDB, it is recommended that you encode most metadata into the series Tags.
Tags are indexed within the InfluxDB system allowing fast querying by 1 or more tag values.
Note that tag values are always interpreted as strings.
And the optimal way to structure things is to have many series and a single field named “value” (or some other key of your choice) used consistently across all series.
It’s also a good idea to start the tag names and measurement names with a character in [a-z] or [A-Z], but not a requirement. It will just make writing queries easier later since you won’t have to wrap the names in double quotes.
Take a common example from the world of computer infrastructure monitoring. Imagine you need to record CPU load across your entire deployment. Furthermore, each CPU is actually composed of two cores, numbered 0 and 1. In this case you could log 4 datapoints into InfluxDB as follows:
cpu_load,host=server01,core=0 value=0.45 1437171724
cpu_load,host=server01,core=1 value=1.56 1437171724
cpu_load,host=server02,core=0 value=0.72 1437171724
cpu_load,host=server02,core=1 value=2.14 1437171724
With the data in this format, querying and aggregating by various dimension is straightforward – filter by tags as necessary.
For example, to see only CPU load information from server01 simply add host='server01' to your query.
This would return data for both cores on that machine.
To only see data from core 1, add host='server01',core='1'.
And so on.