Feeding mutiple hosts to InfluxDB for Grafana not populating tag key data

Help
1

New at this, and figuring things out as I go, so patience is appreciated.

Environment

Ubuntu 20.04, XCP-NG

Problem/Question

Hosts feeding netdata via [backend] to InfluxDB configured for opentsdb. “Shared” measurements aren’t getting host populated. Only one of four hosts is getting populated into the “host” tag key. But all hosts are successfully sending data to the InfluxDB, because there are measurements that contain UUIDs that can be traced back to specific hosts.

Query in Influx:

> select * from "netdata.ipmi.temperatures_c.01_Inlet_Ambient" order by time desc limit 5
name: netdata.ipmi.temperatures_c.01_Inlet_Ambient
time                host              value
----                ----              -----
1630370950000000000 host3.domain.com 30
1630370940000000000 host3.domain.com 30
1630370930000000000 host3.domain.com 30
1630370920000000000 host3.domain.com 30
1630370910000000000 host3.domain.com 30

> show tag keys from "netdata.ipmi.temperatures_c.01_Inlet_Ambient"

name: netdata.ipmi.temperatures_c.01_Inlet_Ambient
tagKey
------
host

So it is showing that the “host” column’s value is the only tag key, but

> show tag values from "netdata.ipmi.temperatures_c.01_Inlet_Ambient" with key = "host"
>

It isn’t returning any values for that key “host” at all, even though it is showing “host3.domain.com” as the value of the tag key in the initial query.

What I expected to happen

I expected it to return at least “host3.domain.com,” and hoping for all four hosts to allow for a filtered query of the measurement in Grafana.

Is there something I should be looking at to help troubleshoot?

2

I suspect you have an issue with InfluxDB configuration/querying, I’m not a specialist in InfluxDB though. I suggest you check that your Netdata hosts send data correctly. You can stop your InfluxDB service and use nc -l -p 4242 to see what data you get from the hosts.

3

BTW, why don’t you use the exporting engine Export metrics to external time-series databases | Learn Netdata ? Backends subsystem is deprecated.

4

What version of InfluxDB do you use?

5

The Influx console shows version 1.6.4

I’m not necessarily tied to that, as I was just following an online guide for bringing the netdata into a central DB for outputting to Grafana and having an available history. So if I can’t get it working this way according to the guides I’ve tried to follow, I can change it out to something else that follows the new exporting system.

All four hosts have the same netdata.conf file (modified to match host details, of course), so I’m not sure why one would be sending data containing the proper data, and the other three wouldn’t.

I suspect you have an issue with InfluxDB configuration/querying,

Grafana has a specific querying language, and that temp measurement will generate a graph that is the same, whether I use no host filter at all or use “host3.domain.com”. But if I use any of the other hosts as a filter, Grafana says there’s no data.

Edit: As it turns out, the version of Netdata provided by the yum repositories for XCP-NG only provide 1.19.0, so I don’t think the exporting engine is available.