influxdb-relay is a small proxy server that is intended to act as a local
InfluxDB UDP listener, collect UDP messages, and then relay those messages on
to a remote InfluxDB server via the HTTP protocol.
This local relay allows you to "fire and forget" InfluxDB messages into a local buffer, and then have them be reasonably likely to be delivered to your InfluxDB server.
This tool may be useful to you, with the following assumptions:
-
You don't mind losing data under load or network problems: by design, this tool has a fixed-size buffer and will drop messages if that buffer gets full.
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You want to isolate your application from InfluxDB uptime: if you're writing supporting metrics to InfluxDB in your main request path, you'd like to collect as much data as possible but you don't want to degrade your app if InfluxDB is down or slow, and you don't want your application to be complicated by having to gracefully recover from InfluxDB errors.
The design of influxdb-relay is very simple: it allocates a bunch of memory
to use as a buffer, and then waits for packets to arrive on its UDP port. When
packets show up, they are read into the buffer and placed into a queue to
write to the InfluxDB backend server. If UDP packets arrive faster than they
can be transmitted to InfluxDB then the buffer will eventually fill, at which
time incoming packets will initially be placed into the OS socket buffer, after
which they will be dropped altogether.
Thus it is important to configure the relay with the appropriate size of buffer to absorb transmission delays to the InfluxDB server, and to ensure that the connection to your InfluxDB server is fast and reliable enough so that the queue can keep up.
If the InfluxDB server is temporarily unavailable then the relay queue will start to fill, and once full new data will be dropped. However, the relay should automatically recover when InfluxDB returns to service, depleting whatever is in the queue and then accepting new packets.
Usage of influxdb-relay:
-buffer-size=4096: Maximum number of packets that can be buffered
-listen-addr="127.0.0.1:4444": Local address for the UDP listener
-max-line-length=256: Maximum line length for line protocol, in bytes
-target-url="http://127.0.0.1:8086/write?db=example": URL where recieved data should be written
-attempt-limit=10: Maximum number of times to retry failed influxdb requests (0=infinite)
The MIT License (MIT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Say Media Inc
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