Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

InfluxData VS RRDTool

Compare InfluxData VS RRDTool and see what are their differences

InfluxData logo InfluxData

Scalable datastore for metrics, events, and real-time analytics.

RRDTool logo RRDTool

High performance data logging and graphing system for time series data
  • InfluxData Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-30
  • RRDTool Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

InfluxData features and specs

  • High Performance
    InfluxData's InfluxDB is designed to handle high write and query loads, making it suitable for time-series data and real-time applications.
  • Open-Source
    The core InfluxDB product is open-source, allowing for transparency, community contributions, and the option to self-host the database.
  • Scalability
    InfluxDB offers horizontal scalability, enabling users to handle increasing volumes of data efficiently through clustering.
  • Built-In Data Processing
    InfluxData offers integrated tools for data processing and scripting, such as Kapacitor for real-time processing and Flux for advanced querying.
  • Rich Ecosystem
    InfluxData provides a comprehensive ecosystem including Telegraf for data collection, Chronograf for visualization, and Kapacitor for alerting and processing.
  • Time-Series Focused
    InfluxDB is optimized for time-series data, offering specialized features like time-based retention policies, continuous queries, and downsampling.
  • Easy Integration
    InfluxDB integrates well with many third-party data visualization and monitoring tools such as Grafana, making it easier to build end-to-end solutions.

Possible disadvantages of InfluxData

  • Complexity
    The comprehensive features and tools in the InfluxData ecosystem can result in a steeper learning curve, especially for novices.
  • Cost
    While the open-source version is free, the enterprise and cloud-hosted versions come with a cost, which can be significant for small to mid-sized businesses.
  • Resource Intensive
    InfluxDB can be resource-intensive, especially under high loads, requiring significant hardware resources for optimal performance.
  • Limited SQL Support
    InfluxDB doesn’t fully support SQL, which can be a hurdle for users accustomed to traditional relational databases. It uses its own query languages like InfluxQL and Flux.
  • Fragmented Documentation
    Some users find the documentation fragmented or lacking in depth, which can make troubleshooting and advanced usage more challenging.
  • Data Backup and Restore
    Managing backups and restores in InfluxDB can be intricate and may require additional effort and tools to ensure data integrity and availability.

RRDTool features and specs

  • Efficient Data Storage
    RRDTool uses a round-robin database structure, which ensures a constant disk footprint by overwriting old data points, making it space efficient.
  • Time Series Data Visualization
    It provides robust graphing capabilities for time series data, making it useful for monitoring trends and patterns over time.
  • Open Source
    Being open-source, RRDTool can be used and modified freely, offering flexibility and customization options to fit specific needs.
  • Built-in Aggregation
    RRDTool automatically consolidates data over time, reducing the need for manual computation and maintaining performance as data scales.
  • Broad Integration
    It is widely supported and can be integrated easily with other tools and systems, such as MRTG and Cacti, enhancing its functionality.

Possible disadvantages of RRDTool

  • Steep Learning Curve
    The tool can be difficult to learn for new users due to its complex command-line interface and diverse set of options.
  • Limited Data Flexibility
    Once a database is created, its size and structure are fixed, meaning changes require a new database setup and could result in data loss.
  • Requires Manual Setup
    There is no automatic data import or setup, requiring users to define configurations and scripts manually, which can be time-consuming.
  • Outdated Interfaces
    The graphical interfaces can appear outdated compared to more modern software, which may not meet current user interface expectations.
  • Performance Limitations
    RRDTool may face performance constraints when dealing with very high-frequency data updates, as it is optimized for a consistent update interval.

Analysis of InfluxData

Overall verdict

  • Yes, InfluxData is considered good for dealing with time-series data.

Why this product is good

  • Specialized Time-Series Database: InfluxData offers InfluxDB, which is specifically tailored for handling time-series data, making it highly efficient for this purpose.
  • Scalability: InfluxDB is known for its high performance and scalability, which is advantageous for applications requiring the processing of large volumes of data quickly.
  • Rich Ecosystem: It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for data collection, analysis, and visualization, which includes the TICK stack (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, and Kapacitor).
  • Ease of Use: The product offerings are designed to be user-friendly, reducing the complexity of setting up and managing time-series databases.
  • Strong Community Support: InfluxData has a robust community and good documentation, which is beneficial for troubleshooting and getting the most out of its tools.

Recommended for

  • IoT Applications: For organizations dealing with IoT devices generating large amounts of time-stamped data.
  • DevOps Monitoring: Useful for monitoring infrastructure and applications due to its ability to collect and store real-time metrics.
  • Finance: Can be employed to track stock prices, or other financial metrics over time.
  • Research: For scientific data that requires precise timestamping and quick retrieval.
  • Energy Management: Ideal for tracking and analyzing power consumption over time.

InfluxData videos

Barbara Nelson [InfluxData] | Best Practices for Data Ingestion into InfluxDB

RRDTool videos

Cacti - The RRDTool-based graphing solution

More videos:

  • Review - Building Network Monitoring Systems with RRDtool

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to InfluxData and RRDTool)
Databases
89 89%
11% 11
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Time Series Database
73 73%
27% 27
Big Data
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare InfluxData and RRDTool

InfluxData Reviews

ReductStore vs. MinIO & InfluxDB on LTE Network: Who Really Wins the Speed Race?
Maintaining consistency between multiple databases, like MinIO and InfluxDB, adds a layer of complexity. In our setup, MinIO, used for blob storage, is linked to data points in InfluxDB via its filename. Any inconsistencies or mismatches between the two could potentially result in data loss. Furthermore, we need to query both databases, which is quite inefficient. Lastly,...
Apache Druid vs. Time-Series Databases
We occasionally get questions regarding how Apache Druid differs from time-series databases (TSDB) such as InfluxDB or Prometheus, and when to use each technology. This short post serves to help answer these questions.
Source: imply.io
4 Best Time Series Databases To Watch in 2019
InfluxDB is part of the TICK stack : Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf and Kapacitor. InfluxData provides, out of the box, a visualization tool (that can be compared to Grafana), a data processing engine that binds directly with InfluxDB, and a set of more than 50+ agents that can collect real-time metrics for a lot of different data sources.
Source: medium.com

RRDTool Reviews

We have no reviews of RRDTool yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, RRDTool should be more popular than InfluxData. It has been mentiond 3 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

InfluxData mentions (2)

  • Can i log data into excel/csv using aws?
    I would highly recommend using a proper Time Series Database like QuestDB or InfluxDB to do this instead. You can always export data from wither of those two into Excel if your boss wants it in excel, but it's much easier to do data transformations, create graphs and reports, etc. If you have all the data in a proper database. Source: over 3 years ago
  • How to stream IoT data into Excel
    I would suggest using something better suited to IoT data than ... a spreadsheet. I'd recommend looking at one of the Time Series Databases for this. 1) QuestDB or 2) InfluxDB as these are much better suited to streaming data. Source: over 3 years ago

RRDTool mentions (3)

  • Seeing through hardware counters: a journey to threefold performance increase
    For anyone interested in how the graphs were made: https://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/ Happy to see people still using RRD after all these years. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • One of the longest standing soundness holes in Rust -- Diving Deep: implied bounds and variance
    (I actually implemented the firmware for this... Using the Arduino port for ESP8266 because I was impatient, but discovered that either my DHT11 modules are junk or I'm misusing them, because the humidity measurement drifts as they keep running. I need to write the Rust+rrdtool app meant to receive the reports and then do some comparative tests between the DHT11 and some BME280s, and between the current firmware... Source: over 3 years ago
  • Arizona in October is solar bliss
    Nice! This is giving me some ideas. Here's what my old school rrdtool-based system looks like:. Source: over 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing InfluxData and RRDTool, you can also consider the following products

TimescaleDB - TimescaleDB is a time-series SQL database providing fast analytics, scalability, with automated data management on a proven storage engine.

Prometheus - An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.

OpenTSDB - OpenTSDB is a distributed, scalable Time Series Database (TSDB) written on top of HBase.

Amazon EMR - Amazon Elastic MapReduce is a web service that makes it easy to quickly process vast amounts of data.

MRTG - MRTG (or Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is an open-source network monitoring tool.

MongoDB - MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance NoSQL database.