Introduction to the TIG Stack

The TIG Stack is an acronym for a platform of open-source tools built to make collection, storage, graphing, and alerting on time series data easy.

A time series is any set of values with a timestamp where time is a significant component of the data. The classic real-world example of a time series is stock currency exchange price data.

To handle the flow of data related to a time series, some widely used tools are:

• Telegraf is a metrics collection agent. Use it to collect and send metrics to InfluxDB. Telegraf’s plugin architecture supports a collection of metrics from 100+ popular services right out of the box.
• InfluxDB is a high-performance Time Series Database. It can store hundreds of thousands of points per second. The InfluxDB SQL-like query language was built specifically for time series.
• Grafana is an open-source platform for data visualization, monitoring, and analysis. In Grafana, users can create dashboards with panels, each representing specific metrics over a set time frame. Grafana supports graphs, tables, heatmaps, and free text panels.

In this Lab we will use the following images:

• https://hub.docker.com//telegraf
• https://hub.docker.com//influxdb
• https://hub.docker.com/r/grafana/grafana

Getting started with InfluxDB

InfluxDB is a time-series database compatible with SQL, so we can setup a database and a user easily. In a terminal execute the following:

docker run -d -p 8086:8086 --name=influxdb  influxdb:1.8

This will keep InfluxDB executing in the background (i.e., detached: -d). Now we connect to the CLI:

docker exec -it influxdb influx

The first step consists in creating a database called “telegraf”:

> create database telegraf
> show databases
name: databases
name
----
_internal
telegraf
>