Help me understand keys / tags for home sensor monitoring

Welcome & Getting Started
1

Relative noob question here, please ignore if you’re not in the mood for it! Thanks in advance.

I am a “home IoT hobbyist”. I have data going (through MQTT and then Node-Red) from a bunch of sensors in my house to InfluxDB / Chronograf running on Amazon Lightsail. This data consists of things like temperature readings, electricity consumption, etc. for various rooms in the house.

Eventually I want to be able to use Chronograf to create overlay graphs of temperature in different rooms, etc.

I am having a bit of trouble figuring out how best I should organize this data when sending it to InfluxDB to make this easy. The Node-Red node I am using would allow me to set “measurements” “fields” and “tags”. I get that the “field” might be something like “temp” or “RH” in my case (holding the actual number), but Chronograf groups “measurements” and “tags” in one column, and I’m not sure how these relate to each other.

How best should I “classify” the data? Given that I have locations like “Living Room”, “Bedroom”, etc. and measurements like Temperature, Humidity, Current, etc. In this case, what should be the “measurements” and what should be the “tags”?

All advice welcome – thanks!

2

Hello @Joe_Q,
Welcome and thanks for your question!
I recommend that your measurement be something like “home IOT hobbyist” and your tags be your various sensors and/or locations.

3

Hi Joe,

Very roughly, an InfluxDB “measurement” is equivalent to an SQL database table.
“Tags” in InfluxDB specify search indexes.
“Fields” are the data you want to retrieve.

So for your situation you can call the measurement whatever you like, and you might like to have a tag called “location” which has values “Living Room”, “Bedroom”, etc. The fields will be the sensor data such as “Temperature”, “Humidity”, “Current”, etc.