Add Metadata Associated to a Series

[samuraraujo]

Proposal: It would be nice if we could store metadata about the series itself, so it could be used for presentation, graphing, etc.

Here is a scenario:

Suppose we have series representing pageviews:

company.uri1.pageview
company.uri2.pageview
company.uri3.pageview
....

The series contain two columns value and timestamp

Ex.
bloghouse.b7cb47c1a9a4642b9882b0cb4393a71fc4dbff44.pageview

value timestamp
1 32874982893
32 32874982895
42 32874982897
....

bloghouse.b7cb47c5454656459882b0cb4393a71fc4dbff44.pageview

value timestamp
1 32874982893
52 32874982895
76 32874982897
....

Now I need to visualize these series in a graph. However, I want to have a nice name to my series,i.e, the title of the page ("Post About Furnish") instead of "bloghouse.b7cb47c1a9a4642b9882b0cb4393a71fc4dbff44.pageview" .

It would be nice if we could store metadata about the series itself, so it could be used for presentation, graphing, etc.

Once stored, the metadata could be obtained by querying as well.

:)

[monkeybutter]

I agree this feature will add a lot of functionality to influxdb. My +1 in regard to this proposal.

At the moment what I do is mapping influxdb series to a mongodb collection containing all the metadata.

[BartVB]

👍

My main use case would be storing the unit of the data. IMO it's insane that we need to manually add this to graphs in the frontend when we know the unit and kind of data on the collector side.

Metadata for series would also make it possible to ask for 'all networking related stats for cluster A' or 'all postgres stats for server X'. Series metadata is much better suited for this than tags.

[pauldix]

You can actually do this using tags. Particularly since there's no limit to the number of tags you can have on a series. The current tag functionality lets you do things like that kind of discovery.

There's a few examples in this post: http://influxdb.com/blog/2015/02/24/influxdb-v0_9_0-rc4_released_now_with_tags_and_more_unicorns.html

[KrishnaPG]

@pauldix This is a valid concept and cannot be achieved with tags alone. I have put some additional info on the challenges with the tags approach in this issue: #3445

The problem is: the "display titles" of tags can change independent of underlying points/measurements.