Documentation

Calculate the moving average

This page documents an earlier version of InfluxDB OSS. InfluxDB 3 Core is the latest stable version.

Use movingAverage() or timedMovingAverage() 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
2020-01-01T00:00:00Z1.0
2020-01-01T00:30:00Z1.2
2020-01-01T01:00:00Z1.8
2020-01-01T01:30:00Z0.9
2020-01-01T02:00:00Z1.4
2020-01-01T02:30:00Z2.0
2020-01-01T03:00:00Z1.9

The following would return:

|> timedMovingAverage(every: 30m, period: 1h)
_time_value
2020-01-01T00:30:00Z1.0
2020-01-01T01:00:00Z1.1
2020-01-01T01:30:00Z1.5
2020-01-01T02:00:00Z1.35
2020-01-01T02:30:00Z1.15
2020-01-01T03:00:00Z1.7
2020-01-01T03:00:00Z2

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New in InfluxDB 3.5

Key enhancements in InfluxDB 3.5 and the InfluxDB 3 Explorer 1.3.

See the Blog Post

InfluxDB 3.5 is now available for both Core and Enterprise, introducing custom plugin repository support, enhanced operational visibility with queryable CLI parameters and manual node management, stronger security controls, and general performance improvements.

InfluxDB 3 Explorer 1.3 brings powerful new capabilities including Dashboards (beta) for saving and organizing your favorite queries, and cache querying for instant access to Last Value and Distinct Value caches—making Explorer a more comprehensive workspace for time series monitoring and analysis.

For more information, check out:

InfluxDB Docker latest tag changing to InfluxDB 3 Core

On November 3, 2025, the latest tag for InfluxDB Docker images will point to InfluxDB 3 Core. To avoid unexpected upgrades, use specific version tags in your Docker deployments.

If using Docker to install and run InfluxDB, the latest tag will point to InfluxDB 3 Core. To avoid unexpected upgrades, use specific version tags in your Docker deployments. For example, if using Docker to run InfluxDB v2, replace the latest version tag with a specific version tag in your Docker pull command–for example:

docker pull influxdb:2