InfluxDB
What it is: Purpose-built time-series database. Optimized for metrics, events, IoT sensor data. Handle millions of writes per second.
What It Does Best
High-velocity writes. Columnar storage, aggressive compression. 10x better compression than traditional databases.
Time-based queries. Downsampling, retention policies, continuous queries. Automatically manage data lifecycle.
TICK stack. Telegraf (collection), InfluxDB (storage), Chronograf (viz), Kapacitor (alerting). Complete monitoring platform.
Pricing
Open source: Free (InfluxDB 2.x). InfluxDB Cloud: $0.002/MB ingested, $0.002/MB queried. Free tier: 30-day retention.
When to Use It
✅ Application performance monitoring (APM)
✅ IoT sensor data and telemetry
✅ DevOps monitoring and metrics
✅ Real-time analytics dashboards
When NOT to Use It
❌ Relational data or complex joins
❌ Data without timestamps
❌ Long-term data storage (use cold storage + downsampling)
Bottom line: Default choice for time-series data. Metrics, sensors, events—InfluxDB handles them efficiently. Flux query language takes learning, but worth it. Free tier is generous for small projects.