Adding InfluxDB did not nuke my data

Installation
1

Hey,

I was adding influxdb and mariadb to optimize my instance and I noticed that after adding influxdb my sensor historic data did not disappear but after I also added mariadb it did.
Have I misconfigured influxdb and it still writing data into maria/sqlite or is it that influx has a graceful data handling?

recorder:
  db_url: !secret mariadb_url
  purge_keep_days: 30
  commit_interval: 20
  exclude:
    domains:
      - automation
      - update
      - sensor
      - binary_sensor
    entity_globs:
      - sensor.sun*
      - weather.*
    entities:
      - sensor.date
      - sensor.last_boot # Comes from 'systemmonitor' sensor platform
      - sun.sun # Don't record sun data
    event_types:
      - call_service # Don't record service calls
influxdb:
  api_version: 2
  ssl: false
  host: !secret influx_host
  port: 8086
  token: !secret influxdb_token
  organization: !secret influxdb_org
  bucket: !secret influxdb_bucket
  tags:
    source: HA
  tags_attributes:
    - friendly_name
  default_measurement: units
  # exclude:
  #   entities:
  #     - zone.home
  #   domains:
  #     - persistent_notification
  #     - person
  include:
    domains:
      - sensor
      - binary_sensor
  #     - sun
  #   entities:
  #     - weather.home
2

Influxdb does not replace recorder. It works in parallel.

3

So when I added influxdb it was reading sqlite+influx data but maria replaces sqlite outright and I was looking at mariadb+influx but on replacing it did have any sqlite data, so hence it looked like the data got dumped. I understand now.
Went to influx web panel and data is being sent there, so it looks like it is working!

4

SQLite is the default HA recorder database engine. When you switched over to MariaDB, it completely replaced SQLite and thus all of the historical data was deleted.

InfluxDB is a data historian, that HA pushes data to and is independent of the SQLite/MariaDB databases.

None of the built-in HA charting tools use InfluxDB. They all look to the HA recorder DB (i.e. SQLite or MariaDB). InfluxDB is a completely separate data historian. Most use Grafana to create dashboards based on the InfluxDB data.

5

@ogiewon said it better than me.

1 Like
6

Now I understand! Well am still confused but I understand.
I was getting confused because in the recorder section I excluded sensor data because i thought HA is going to use (read) influxdb for that data but when I would look at History tab for sensors while using mariadb+influxdb configuration and I would not see updates but then I check influxdb directly it had data coming to it. I though maybe I got something misconfigured and because of it data is not being from influx.

Now I understand that influxdb is effectively a sensor backup/export. What now confuses me… why not just use/integrate into HA? Influxdb is optimized for timeseries data and if you already have an instance running.

EDIT: Less confused.
I presumed that “Sensor” section in Home assistant’s influxdb documentation page was not to monitor the database itself but exactly for what I was looking for for reading sensor data from influxdb to display sensor data inside of HA. However, influxdb version 2 syntax for doing looks… well messy.

1 Like