Storing sensor data

Today I started looking into installing Prometheus on Heroku (a platform as a service provider), and soon realised that Prometheus saves its data to the filesystem. Cool if you have your own server with a bunch of disk space, but not so great for Heroku that specialises in read-only secure filesystems.

Prometheus does also have the ability to save to a remote PostgreSQL/TimescaleDB database, but while looking into that, a friend’s recommendation of InfluxDB popped into my mind.

The big difference between the two is that Prometheus scrapes data from devices, where InfluxDB relies on the devices posting their data.

Because I’m at the early stages of this project, I thought it might be nice to see if I could get the Enviro+ exporter to do both.

I decided to setup an InfluxDB-Cloud account, which is free for:

• Write up to 5MB/5 minutes
• Data retention of 30 days
• Up to 10,000 series of data

A little hacking later, and I now have a branch setup with the InfluxDB functionality.

Success! I’ll leave it running a while and see how it performs.