InfluxData releases InfluxDB Notebooks to improve communication for software development teams

InfluxData announced the general availability of InfluxDB Notebooks, a new capability that improves communication for software development teams, ultimately enhancing productivity within InfluxDB Cloud.

InfluxDB Notebooks is the first of the company’s new capabilities designed to make it easier for developers to collaborate around time series data within the platform.

Developers rarely work alone; they almost always work in teams. One of the challenges of working together is communication — developers need seamless communication to streamline their development activities.

InfluxDB Notebooks addresses this challenge by allowing developers to discuss time series data analyses and trends inside the platform rather than switching conversations to third-party messaging applications, which can slow them down significantly.

This new capability allows users to create a durable artifact that shows teams how time series data is analyzed to solve business problems.

“Development teams are more distributed than ever, but until now, they haven’t had the tools they need to seamlessly communicate around time series data,” said Russ Savage, director of product management at InfluxData.

“To solve this problem, we’ve reimagined InfluxDB as a way to collaborate around data, not just store it. This new approach will dramatically save time for developers, so they can focus on building software.”

With InfluxDB Notebooks, developer teams can quickly:

• Design time series data pipelines with dynamic data, live code, and real-time visualizations — all with inline explanatory notes — effectively showing their work and sharing it with others
• Share incident investigations to explain root cause following service outages, and build runbooks to avoid future outages
• Document how IoT sensor data has been collected, normalized, enriched and downsampled to facilitate preventive maintenance and forecast device obsolescence

InfluxDB Annotations will soon follow InfluxDB Notebooks and is another new capability that enables adding notes directly on dashboard cells to more quickly highlight and explain the meaning of anomalies in time series data and coordinate troubleshooting efforts.

It will be used to capture context and share details about ongoing investigations into outlier data points that are underway. This will save teams time by eliminating the need for multiple people to repeat the same investigation.

These new capabilities support better collaboration workflows between developers, SREs, and every stakeholder involved in time series collection, enrichment, and analysis.

InfluxDB Notebooks lets teams weave together computational information such as code, data and statistics with narrative, and graphs, while InfluxDB Annotations helps developers share contextual clues so they can quickly determine the root cause of incidents and restore services faster.