Using technology to help businesses thrive is always a thrill, but it doesn’t compare to the sense of accomplishment on both a personal and organizational level when you see your tech used to positively impact humanity. It’s one thing to function in a support role for these initiatives, but it’s also important to acknowledge the businesses at the vanguard, building their primary mission around positive human and global impact.

The U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) Army Research Laboratory (ARL) faces unique challenges in working with data to develop new technologies. It needs the ability to seamlessly analyze data both in the field and in the lab. Connectivity in the field can also be very unpredictable. Without a database that can handle intermittent connectivity, the systems become inefficient and waste time and money.

Time series databases like InfluxDB are databases that specialize in handling time series data, which is data that is indexed by time. Unlike traditional databases, time series databases are optimized for reading and writing data with less performance consideration for updating or deleting data. Due to the time-dependent nature of time series data, time series databases are handy for application monitoring.

Hulu, the entertainment streaming platform, needed a solution to scale up its internal application and infrastructure monitoring platform as it grew beyond 1 million metrics per second. The solution it created combines two open source tools— InfluxDB, a time series database, and Kafka, an event-streaming platform. It’s not just global enterprises like Hulu that have access to world-class tools and infrastructure to achieve their business goals.

A common debate in software development focuses on whether to use already-available tools or services, which offer better developer productivity, or stick with lower-level tools or custom-built solutions, which offer more control and potentially better performance and flexibility. This can be boiled down to the decision of whether to build or buy. These two approaches are at the root of many current tech industry ideological conflicts.

Telegraf has now reached 300+ plugins and is deployed in a wide variety of use cases. In January we released a blog post covering the golden rules for creating configs and optimizing your Telegraf agent. It’s now about time we got our hands dirty covering some of the plugins the community uses the most. In this post, we are going to cover the SNMP Input Plugin.

Telegraf, InfluxData’s open source data collection agent, is a key tool for managing data pipelines. Users around the world rely on Telegraf’s flexibility to collect, clean, transform, and send data. But even with Telegraf’s immense popularity, we continue to look for ways to make it even easier to use. That’s why, when we launched InfluxDB University, we knew that Telegraf would be a key ingredient.

Herrenknecht AG is a technology leader in mechanized tunneling systems. Engineers at Herrenknecht set out to build an industrial internet of things (IIoT) platform that provided insight into live and historic data for all their tunnel boring machines (TBMs). These machines have thousands of sensors generating high velocity data, sometimes in remote areas with limited connectivity.

We love to write and ship code to help developers bring their ideas and projects to life. That’s why we’re constantly working on improving our product in sync with developer needs to ensure their happiness and accelerate time to awesome. This is the first in a blog series covering our product’s latest features — features that we think will save you time and effort when building with time series and InfluxDB.