Frequently asked questions

Time series data is a sequence of data points, each associated with a timestamp, that measure how something changes over time. Common examples include server and application metrics, network telemetry, financial prices, and sensor readings such as temperature, pressure, and voltage. Time series workloads are write-heavy, append-mostly, and queried by time range.

InfluxDB is a purpose-built time series database for storing and querying large volumes of timestamped data in real time. Common use cases include infrastructure and application monitoring, network monitoring, IoT and industrial sensor data, energy and battery (BESS) systems, and financial market analytics. It is optimized for high-ingest workloads and fast queries that power dashboards, alerting, and automation.

InfluxDB is used across industrial IoT (IIoT) and manufacturing, energy and battery energy storage systems (BESS), software observability and DevOps monitoring, telecommunications and network operations, financial services, and aerospace. These domains share a common need: ingest high-frequency measurements from many sources and query them by time for monitoring, analytics, and control.

Use a time series database when your primary access pattern is “what happened over this time range” and you ingest a continuous stream of timestamped measurements. It is the right choice for metrics, events, sensor data, and telemetry, where write throughput is high and queries aggregate or downsample data by time. A general-purpose relational database is a better fit for transactional, relationship-heavy data that isn’t primarily organized by time.

A time series database is optimized for timestamped data: it ingests millions of points per second, indexes by time, and runs time-windowed aggregations efficiently. A relational database is optimized for transactional integrity and relationships across normalized tables. You can store time series in a relational database, but a single time-range query can scan millions of rows. InfluxDB stores and queries data by time out of the box, optionally downsamples data after a set age, and uses a query engine tuned for time-based access.

Yes. InfluxDB 3 Core is open source under the permissive MIT or Apache 2.0 license and is free to download and run with no license key. InfluxDB 3 Enterprise is a commercial product built on the same engine; it offers a 30-day free trial and a free at-home license for non-commercial use. The earlier InfluxDB 1 and InfluxDB 2 open source releases remain available under open source licenses. For new projects, use InfluxDB 3.

For new projects, use InfluxDB 3. For new production workloads, use InfluxDB 3 Enterprise; use InfluxDB 3 Core for free, open source, single-node deployments. See Which InfluxDB 3 should I use? for a full decision guide across InfluxDB 3 products and for migrating from InfluxDB 1 or InfluxDB 2.