Flux, the new InfluxData Data Scripting Language (formerly IFQL), super-charges queries both for analytics and data science. Matt will give a quick overview of the language features as well as the moving parts for a working deployment. Grafana is an open source dashboard solution that shares Flux’s passion for analytics and data science. For that reason, they are very excited to showcase the new Flux support within Grafana, and a couple of common analytics use cases to get the most out of your data. In this talk, Matt Toback from Grafana Labs will share the latest updates they have made with their Flux builder in Grafana.

1. Optimizing Grafana for Flux
Matt Toback

2. TL;DR
● Flux is powerful
● You can start playing with Flux in Grafana today
○ Flux support in Grafana is available via a new datasource
plugin
● For now, no automated way to migrate dashboards
○ Transpiler for Influx queries is being worked on
○ You can migrate your dashboards and panels manually

3. Housekeeping: Upgrade to v5

4. Provisioning API: Config as code

5. Feedback: david@grafana.com

6. Flux

7. Flux Design Goals
Decouplings Galore!
● Decouple language from the execution
engine
○ Execution engine takes a DAG of transformations
○ Transpilers: Flux, Influx Query, PromQL
● Decouple database from query computation
○ Iterate faster on query engine
○ Keep database untouched
○ Independently scalable
● Add more functions
○ Chainable: transformation from input table to
output table

8. Flux recap
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> range(start: -1h)

9. Flux primer: Select one value from a table
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> range(start: -1h)
|> max() // Selector

10. Flux primer: Window-chunk and aggregate
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“_measurement”] == “cpu”)
|> range(start: -1h)
|> window(every: 10m)
|> mean() // Aggregator
|> filter(fn: (r) => r._value > 1) // Having

11. Flux query planning
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> range(start: -1h)
|> max()
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> range(start: -1h)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> max()
● Same plan DAG

12. Flux query planning gotchas
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> range(start: -1h)
|> max()
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> max() // Selector function returns 1 record
|> range(start: -1h)
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> range(start: -1h)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“_value”] > 1) // Full table scan

13. User defined functions
select = (db=”telegraf”, m, f) => {
return from(db:db)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r._measurement == m
and r._field == f)
}
select(m: “cpu”, f: “usage_user”)
|> filter(fn: (r) => r[“host”] == “myServer”)
|> range(start: -1h)

14. Chainable user defined functions
myFilter = (m, f, table=<-) => {
return table
|> filter(fn: (r) => r._measurement == m
and r._field == f)
}
from(db: “telegraf”)
|> myFilter(m: “cpu”, f: “usage_user”)
|> range(start: -1h)

15. Flux function library
https://github.com/influxdata/platform/tree/master/query/functions

16. Math on tables
cpu = from(db)...
CpuRequests = from(db)...
join(
tables: {cpu: cpu, req: CpuRequests},
fn: (t) => t.cpu._value / t.req._value
) // Implicit join on time

17. New response format: CSV

18. Get started: Flux
● Run latest influxd (nightly)
○ https://portal.influxdata.com/downloads
○ influxd config > config.toml # enable ifql
influxd -config config.toml
● Run nightly build of fluxd
○ https://s3.amazonaws.com/dl.influxdata.com/flux/nightlies/fluxd_nightly_macOS_amd64.tar.gz
○ https://s3.amazonaws.com/dl.influxdata.com/flux/nightlies/fluxd_nightly_linux_amd64.tar.gz
○ Generate config and start like done above
● Generate data
○ brew install telegraf
telegraf

19. Get started: Grafana datasource
● Get Grafana nightly or check out master
○ Clone, build, and run from Github; or use a docker image:
grafana/grafana-dev:master-25e1d72
○ Support for the plugin will be in v5.2
● Install Flux datasource plugin
○ https://github.com/grafana/influxdb-flux-datasource
○ Clone into data/plugins
○ Restart Grafana
● Add datasource Flux
● Add dashboard
● Add panel

20. Demo

21. Datasource feature summary
● Syntax highlighting, tab completion, raw table preview
● Inline function documentation
● $range variable

22. Datasource feature summary
● Shortcodes
● Template variables with
helper functions
○ measurements()
○ field_keys()
○ tags()
○ tag_values()
● Annotations

23. Release!

24. Thanks for listening!
Questions?
@mattttt