Install InfluxDB on Debian Jessie with Telegraf

Introduction

InfluxDB is a time-series based database written in Go. InfluxDB has many practical uses, one of which is storing monitoring data on servers. In this guide, you’ll learn how to install InfluxDB on Debian Jessie and write data into it through Telegraf. Telegraf is a server-monitoring plugin for InfluxDB which grabs information about a server, for example:

• CPU usage
• Memory usage
• Disk usage
• Load average

Requirements

• Debian Jessie
• 30 minutes time

Installation

The installation package for InfluxDB and Telegraf are both provided as .deb, so we can install them on your system through the dpkg -i command. Furthermore, we’ll download both packages and install them through the following commands:

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/influxdb/releases/influxdb_1.1.1_amd64.deb
wget https://dl.influxdata.com/telegraf/releases/telegraf_1.1.2_amd64.deb
dpkg -i influxdb_1.1.1_amd64.deb
dpkg -i telegraf_1.1.2_amd64.deb

Please check the official download page for both packages before downloading them. Newer versions may have become available.

Make sure to run the following command after installing both packages in order to ensure that there are no dependencies missing on your system:

apt-get -f install

Configure InfluxDB

Since InfluxDB is only accessible from localhost, we don’t have to change any configuration files for now. If you later want to use the InfluxDB web interface ( which would be located at <SERVER_IP>:8083 ), you should set a proper root password.

Configure Telegraf

The default Telegraf configuration can be removed and flattened to the following few lines:

[outputs]
[outputs.influxdb]
    url = "http://localhost:8086"
    database = "telegraf"

As you may have noticed, we did not create the database telegraf that is defined in this configuration. It will be created automatically.

Start

We can now start both InfluxDB and Telegraf using the following commands. These commands will also make both services start on boot.

systemctl enable influxdb
systemctl enable telegraf
systemctl start influxdb
systemctl start telegraf

Conclusion

At this point, the values mentioned in the “Introduction” section are being added to the InfluxDB database at an interval of 10 seconds. InfluxDB is setup and ready to go. You could now use a tool like Grafana to visualize the metrics in your InfluxDB. Happy hacking!