Making Grafana use influxql with InfluxDB2?

InfluxDB 2
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Hey all,

I’m currently trying to get a solid test environment up for logs/metrics with InfluxDB2, telegraf, vector, and Grafana.

I have been searching these forums and other locations for answers. There’s been a little bit that’s helped, but not enough. So I’m posting this.

First, some background:

During my experimentation I found the blog posts about the future plans for the open source versions of InfluxDB, as well as the fact that flux is not going to be developed further.

Which, I think, means that my best bet is to run InfluxDB2, and then use influxql based queries to get my data out of it. The idea being that when I upgrade to the new community edition based on v3, the influxql queries will transfer more easily.

I also looked at using v1, but I think it is no longer receiving any updates, right?

My problem is that I can’t seem to get Grafana to talk to InfluxDB2 via influxql. Using their flux plugin works, but it gets weird when I tell Grafana to treat the InfluxDB2 instance like a v1 instance.

Grafana can connect to the db. And it can access some data. But when I try to query a specific bucket/db, I get “retention policy not found” errors.

I have created retention policies like the docs direct for both my metrics and my logs buckets.

influx v1 dbrp create \
  --bucket-id id \
  --db bucket-name \
  --rp autogen

And I can see the policies when I list them.

But if I use grafana’s explore screen, and set “FROM” to “bucket-name”, the retention policy error still shows up.

Also, oddly, instead of showing the buckets as options when I click in the “FROM” input field, all I see are “default” and “autogen”. If I select either of those options, I can see measurements and fields from my metrics bucket, but nothing from my logs bucket.

All that background out of the way, here are my questions:

  • Is my plan to use influxql with InfluxDB2 in order to ease upgrades to the new Community Edition a good plan?
  • What am I missing when it comes to getting Grafana to work the way I’ve been trying?
  • InfluxDB2’s UI doesn’t support influxql, right?

Thanks in advance!

2

Hi @jerrac and welcome to the InfluxDB forum.

Yes, your plan to use InfluxQL with InfluxDB2 is fine (I prefer Flux, but hey ho). To really be ready for the future, you can use SQL with InfluxDB Cloud v3 (and then if / when an on-prem version is released, you can install and transition to that).

For Grafana, check out the end of this thread.

AFAIK, InfluxDB2’s UI does not support InfluxQL (only Flux), but I might be wrong.

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