Step 2 - Install InfluxDB Enterprise data nodes

InfluxDB Enterprise offers highly scalable clusters on your infrastructure and a management UI for working with clusters. The next steps will get you up and running with the second essential component of your InfluxDB Enterprise cluster: the data nodes.

If you have not set up your meta nodes, please visit Installing meta nodes. Bad things can happen if you complete the following steps without meta nodes.

Data node setup description and requirements

The Production Installation process sets up two data nodes and each data node runs on its own server. You must have a minimum of two data nodes in a cluster. InfluxDB Enterprise clusters require at least two data nodes for high availability and redundancy.
Note: that there is no requirement for each data node to run on its own server. However, best practices are to deploy each data node on a dedicated server.

See the Clustering guide for more on cluster architecture.

Other requirements

License key or file

InfluxDB Enterprise requires a license key OR a license file to run. Your license key is available at InfluxPortal. Contact support at the email we provided at signup to receive a license file. License files are required only if the nodes in your cluster cannot reach portal.influxdata.com on port 80 or 443.

Networking

Data nodes communicate over ports 8088, 8089, and 8091.

For licensing purposes, data nodes must also be able to reach portal.influxdata.com on port 80 or 443. If the data nodes cannot reach portal.influxdata.com on port 80 or 443, you’ll need to set the license-path setting instead of the license-key setting in the data node configuration file.

Load balancer

InfluxDB Enterprise does not function as a load balancer. You will need to configure your own load balancer to send client traffic to the data nodes on port 8086 (the default port for the HTTP API).

User account

The installation package creates user influxdb that is used to run the influxdb data service. influxdb user also owns certain files that are needed for the service to start successfully. In some cases, local policies may prevent the local user account from being created and the service fails to start. Contact your systems administrator for assistance with this requirement.

Data node setup

Step 1: Add appropriate DNS entries for each of your servers

Ensure that your servers’ hostnames and IP addresses are added to your network’s DNS environment. The addition of DNS entries and IP assignment is usually site and policy specific; contact your DNS administrator for assistance as necessary. Ultimately, use entries similar to the following (hostnames and domain IP addresses are representative).

Verification steps:

Before proceeding with the installation, verify on each meta and data server that the other servers are resolvable. Here is an example set of shell commands using ping:

ping -qc 1 enterprise-meta-01
ping -qc 1 enterprise-meta-02
ping -qc 1 enterprise-meta-03
ping -qc 1 enterprise-data-01
ping -qc 1 enterprise-data-02

We highly recommend that each server be able to resolve the IP from the hostname alone as shown here. Resolve any connectivity issues before proceeding with the installation. A healthy cluster requires that every meta node and data node in a cluster be able to communicate.

Step 2: Set up, configure, and start the data node services

Perform the following steps on each data node.

I. Download and install the data service

Ubuntu and Debian (64-bit)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-data_1.8.3-c1.8.3_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i influxdb-data_1.8.3-c1.8.3_amd64.deb

RedHat and CentOS (64-bit)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-data-1.8.3_c1.8.3.x86_64.rpm
sudo yum localinstall influxdb-data-1.8.3_c1.8.3.x86_64.rpm

Verify the authenticity of release download (recommended)

For added security, follow these steps to verify the signature of your InfluxDB download with gpg.

1. Download and import InfluxData’s public key:

   curl -sL https://repos.influxdata.com/influxdb.key | gpg --import
   

2. Download the signature file for the release by adding .asc to the download URL. For example:

   wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-data-1.8.3_c1.8.3.x86_64.rpm.asc
   

3. Verify the signature with gpg --verify:

   gpg --verify influxdb-data-1.8.3_c1.8.3.x86_64.rpm.asc influxdb-data-1.8.3_c1.8.3.x86_64.rpm
   

   The output from this command should include the following:

   gpg: Good signature from "InfluxDB Packaging Service <support@influxdb.com>" [unknown]
   

II. Edit the data node configuration files

First, in /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf:

• Uncomment hostname at the top of the file and set it to the full hostname of the data node.
• Uncomment auth-enabled in the [http] section and set it to true.
• Uncomment meta-auth-enabled in the [meta] section and set it to true.
• Uncomment meta-internal-shared-secret in the [meta] section and set it to a long pass phrase. The internal shared secret is used in JWT authentication for intra-node communication. This value must be same for all of your data nodes and match the [meta] internal-shared-secret value in the configuration files of your meta nodes.

Second, in /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf, set:

license-key in the [enterprise] section to the license key you received on InfluxPortal OR license-path in the [enterprise] section to the local path to the JSON license file you received from InfluxData.

# Change this option to true to disable reporting.
# reporting-disabled = false
# bind-address = ":8088"
hostname="<enterprise-data-0x>"

[enterprise]
  # license-key and license-path are mutually exclusive, use only one and leave the other blank
  license-key = "<your_license_key>" # Mutually exclusive with license-path

  # The path to a valid license file.  license-key and license-path are mutually exclusive,
  # use only one and leave the other blank.
  license-path = "/path/to/readable/JSON.license.file" # Mutually exclusive with license-key

[meta]
  # Where the cluster metadata is stored
  dir = "/var/lib/influxdb/meta" # data nodes do require a local meta directory
...
  # This setting must have the same value as the meta nodes' meta.auth-enabled configuration.
  meta-auth-enabled = true

[...]

[http]
  # Determines whether HTTP endpoint is enabled.
  # enabled = true

  # The bind address used by the HTTP service.
  # bind-address = ":8086"

  # Determines whether HTTP authentication is enabled.
  auth-enabled = true # Recommended, but not required

[...]

  # The JWT auth shared secret to validate requests using JSON web tokens.
  shared-secret = "long pass phrase used for signing tokens"

III. Start the data service

On sysvinit systems, enter:

service influxdb start

On systemd systems, enter:

sudo systemctl start influxdb

Verification steps:

Check to see that the process is running by entering:

ps aux | grep -v grep | grep influxdb

You should see output similar to:

influxdb  2706  0.2  7.0 571008 35376 ?        Sl   15:37   0:16 /usr/bin/influxd -config /etc/influxdb/influxdb.conf

If you do not see the expected output, the process is either not launching or is exiting prematurely. Check the logs for error messages and verify the previous setup steps are complete.

If you see the expected output, repeat for the remaining data nodes. Once all data nodes have been installed, configured, and launched, move on to the next section to join the data nodes to the cluster.

Join the data nodes to the cluster

On one and only one of the meta nodes that you set up in the previous document, run:

influxd-ctl add-data enterprise-data-01:8088

influxd-ctl add-data enterprise-data-02:8088

The expected output is:

Added data node y at enterprise-data-0x:8088

Run the add-data command once and only once for each data node you are joining to the cluster.

Verification steps:

Issue the following command on any meta node:

influxd-ctl show

The expected output is:

Data Nodes
==========
ID   TCP Address               Version
4    enterprise-data-01:8088   1.8.3-c1.8.3
5    enterprise-data-02:8088   1.8.3-c1.8.3

Meta Nodes
==========
TCP Address               Version
enterprise-meta-01:8091   1.8.3-c1.8.3
enterprise-meta-02:8091   1.8.3-c1.8.3
enterprise-meta-03:8091   1.8.3-c1.8.3

The output should include every data node that was added to the cluster. The first data node added should have ID=N, where N is equal to one plus the number of meta nodes. In a standard three meta node cluster, the first data node should have ID=4 Subsequently added data nodes should have monotonically increasing IDs. If not, there may be artifacts of a previous cluster in the metastore.

If you do not see your data nodes in the output, please retry adding them to the cluster.

Once your data nodes are part of your cluster move on to the final step to set up Chronograf.