Top 5 Hurdles for Flux Beginners and Resources for Learning to Use Flux

Are you new to InfluxDB v2.0 and Flux? Are you intimidated by learning a new time series scripting and query language? Perhaps you’re an InfluxDB v1.x user and you’re familiar with InfluxQL, and you’re unconvinced that learning Flux is worth your while? Or maybe you missed the Top 10 Hurdles for Flux Beginners session at InfluxDays North America 2020?

This two-part blog series aims to demonstrate the power of Flux and walk you through solutions to the top hurdles for both new and old InfluxDB users:

• The first post (the current one you’re reading) introduces some of the most common hurdles for Flux beginners.
• The second post introduces some additional hurdles for intermediate Flux users.

Before we dive into Flux, let’s take a second to introduce it. Flux is a functional query and scripting language which was initially made available starting with InfluxDB v1.8+ and it is the primary language supported within InfluxDB v2.0 and Cloud. It is open source and JavaScript-esque. While the v2.0 API supports InfluxQL via backward compatibility, the power offered by Flux for working with data is substantial. A simple query might look like this:

from(bucket:"example-bucket")
  |> range(start:-1h)
  |> filter(fn:(r) =>
    r._measurement == "my-measurement" and
    r.my-tag-key == "my-tag-value"
  )