Documentation

Calculate the moving average

This page documents an earlier version of InfluxDB OSS. InfluxDB OSS v2 is the latest stable version. See the equivalent InfluxDB v2 documentation: Calculate the moving average.

Use the movingAverage() or timedMovingAverage() functions to return the moving average of data.

data
  |> movingAverage(n: 5)

// OR

data
  |> timedMovingAverage(every: 5m, period: 10m)

movingAverage()

For each row in a table, movingAverage() returns the average of the current value and previous values where n is the total number of values used to calculate the average.

If n = 3:

Row #Calculation
1Insufficient number of rows
2Insufficient number of rows
3(Row1 + Row2 + Row3) / 3
4(Row2 + Row3 + Row4) / 3
5(Row3 + Row4 + Row5) / 3

Given the following input:

_time_value
2020-01-01T00:01:00Z1.0
2020-01-01T00:02:00Z1.2
2020-01-01T00:03:00Z1.8
2020-01-01T00:04:00Z0.9
2020-01-01T00:05:00Z1.4
2020-01-01T00:06:00Z2.0

The following would return:

|> movingAverage(n: 3)
_time_value
2020-01-01T00:03:00Z1.33
2020-01-01T00:04:00Z1.30
2020-01-01T00:05:00Z1.36
2020-01-01T00:06:00Z1.43

timedMovingAverage()

For each row in a table, timedMovingAverage() returns the average of the current value and all row values in the previous period (duration). It returns moving averages at a frequency defined by the every parameter.

Each color in the diagram below represents a period of time used to calculate an average and the time a point representing the average is returned. If every = 30m and period = 1h:

0:000:301:001:302:002:303:003:002:302:001:301:000:30

Given the following input:

_time_value
2020-01-01T00:01:00Z1.0
2020-01-01T00:02:00Z1.2
2020-01-01T00:03:00Z1.8
2020-01-01T00:04:00Z0.9
2020-01-01T00:05:00Z1.4
2020-01-01T00:06:00Z2.0

The following would return:

|> timedMovingAverage(
  every: 2m,
  period: 4m
)
_time_value
2020-01-01T00:02:00Z1.000
2020-01-01T00:04:00Z1.333
2020-01-01T00:06:00Z1.325
2020-01-01T00:06:00Z1.150

Was this page helpful?

Thank you for your feedback!


The future of Flux

Flux is going into maintenance mode. You can continue using it as you currently are without any changes to your code.

Read more

InfluxDB 3 Open Source Now in Public Alpha

InfluxDB 3 Open Source is now available for alpha testing, licensed under MIT or Apache 2 licensing.

We are releasing two products as part of the alpha.

InfluxDB 3 Core, is our new open source product. It is a recent-data engine for time series and event data. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise is a commercial version that builds on Core’s foundation, adding historical query capability, read replicas, high availability, scalability, and fine-grained security.

For more information on how to get started, check out: