InfluxDB is an open-source database built specifically for time-series data: measurements and events that are tracked, monitored, downsampled, and aggregated over time. On InfluxData’s own site, the project describes time-series data as the natural format for metrics, system and application monitoring, and readings from sensors and devices, and positions InfluxDB as a store designed for the high-volume, time-ordered writes those sources produce.
The data model is organized around measurements, tags, and fields, with support for nanosecond-precision timestamps and multiple field types rather than only floating-point numbers. According to InfluxData’s documentation, this lets the database handle both regularly and irregularly spaced series and serve operational workloads (real-time monitoring), analytical workloads (historical analysis), and embedding into live systems. The emphasis throughout is on ingesting data fast and answering queries over time windows efficiently.
InfluxDB’s origin is documented in InfluxData’s own retrospective blog post. In September 2013, founders Todd Persen, John Shahid, and Paul Dix were working on Errplane, a real-time metrics and monitoring product, when they recognized at the Monitorama conference that many organizations needed a way to store and query time-series data at scale. That conviction led them to build an open-source time-series database, and the project grew over the following years into a broader platform with companion tools such as the Telegraf collector and the Kapacitor processing engine before reaching its 1.0 release.