Step 1 - Install InfluxDB Enterprise meta nodes

InfluxDB Enterprise offers highly scalable clusters on your infrastructure and a management UI (via Chronograf for working with clusters. The Production Installation process is designed for users looking to deploy InfluxDB Enterprise in a production environment. The following steps will get you up and running with the first essential component of your InfluxDB Enterprise cluster: the meta nodes.

Meta node setup description and requirements

The Production Installation process sets up three meta nodes, with each meta node running on its own server.
You must have a minimum of three meta nodes in a cluster. InfluxDB Enterprise clusters require at least three meta nodes and an odd number of meta nodes for high availability and redundancy. InfluxData does not recommend having more than three meta nodes unless your servers or the communication between the servers have chronic reliability issues.
Note: Deploying multiple meta nodes on the same server is strongly discouraged since it creates a larger point of potential failure if that particular server is unresponsive. InfluxData recommends deploying meta nodes on relatively small footprint servers.

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.

Ports

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

For licensing purposes, meta nodes must also be able to reach portal.influxdata.com on port 80 or 443. If the meta 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 meta node configuration file.

User account

The installation package creates an influxdb user used to run the influxdb meta service. The influxdb user also owns certain files needed to start the service. 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.

Meta 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 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

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 can communicate with every other meta node.

Step 2: Set up, configure, and start the meta services

Perform the following steps on each meta server.

I. Download and install the meta service

Ubuntu & Debian (64-bit)

wget https://dl.influxdata.com/enterprise/releases/influxdb-meta_1.8.3-c1.8.3_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i influxdb-meta_1.8.3-c1.8.3_amd64.deb

RedHat & CentOS (64-bit)

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

3. Verify the signature with gpg --verify:

   gpg --verify influxdb-meta-1.8.3_c1.8.3.x86_64.rpm.asc influxdb-meta-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 configuration file

In /etc/influxdb/influxdb-meta.conf:

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

# Hostname advertised by this host for remote addresses.  This must be resolvable by all
# other nodes in the cluster
hostname="<enterprise-meta-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

  # 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

III. Start the meta service

On sysvinit systems, enter:

service influxdb-meta start

On systemd systems, enter:

sudo systemctl start influxdb-meta

Verification steps:

Check to see that the process is running by entering:

ps aux | grep -v grep | grep influxdb-meta

You should see output similar to:

influxdb  3207  0.8  4.4 483000 22168 ?        Ssl  17:05   0:08 /usr/bin/influxd-meta -config /etc/influxdb/influxdb-meta.conf

Note: It is possible to start the cluster with a single meta node but you must pass the -single-server flag when starting the single meta node. Please note that a cluster with only one meta node is not recommended for production environments.

Step 3: Join the meta nodes to the cluster

From one and only one meta node, join all meta nodes including itself. In our example, from enterprise-meta-01, run:

influxd-ctl add-meta enterprise-meta-01:8091

influxd-ctl add-meta enterprise-meta-02:8091

influxd-ctl add-meta enterprise-meta-03:8091

Note: Please make sure that you specify the fully qualified host name of the meta node during the join process. Please do not specify localhost as this can cause cluster connection issues.

The expected output is:

Added meta node x at enterprise-meta-0x:8091

Verification steps:

Issue the following command on any meta node:

influxd-ctl show

The expected output is:

Data Nodes
==========
ID      TCP Address      Version

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

Note that your cluster must have at least three meta nodes. If you do not see your meta nodes in the output, please retry adding them to the cluster.

Once your meta nodes are part of your cluster move on to the next steps to set up your data nodes. Please do not continue to the next steps if your meta nodes are not part of the cluster.