There are THREE different ways to query data: InfluxQL, Flux and TICKScripts…all inferior to PromQL imo. The worse is Influx encourages you to mix them (e.g. PromQL in TICK), causing even more confusion. Documentation on advanced use cases is non existent.
Been an absolute nightmare tbh. The new company had a similar evolution too: holding non-metrics data in influx while also holding metrics. Trying to at least move metrics onto a Prom/Thanos stack here soon.
Regarding docs on advanced use cases, if you haven't already, try posting questions in the community forum: https://community.influxdata.com. Or, if you prefer Slack, there's a link at the top of that page to join our community Slack. We do our best to help with specific issues in those spaces and we also look for common themes that are causing problems for multiple users so that we can focus our efforts there, whether that's bug fixes, performance, features, or docs.
To be fair, we still haven't paid you guys a dime so I can't complain. But if you're interested in hearing my thoughts I can email you after next week's holiday.
Minor nit on "TSM (not TSI)" - TSM (.tsm files) are the data files and that format hasn't changed. TSI is the newer, although mature at this point, indexing option that spills onto disk and can therefore be larger than the original in-mem index. You're probably using in-mem indexing.
We're always interested in feedback. My name is david. You can email me at <name> at influxdata dot com.
We went from using Prometheus itself to scrape metrics from services and export them to influxdb (fine, but very heavy), to using kapacitor (an utter nightmare for this particular use case), to just writing our own Prometheus metrics harvester from scratch (took about 3 days with service discovery). The current solution has been in place for more than a year and it’s perfect.
I love influxdb’s on-disk compression, but its query planner and unpredictable ram usage leave a lot to be desired (at least the 1.x versions).