title: influxdb and tracking groups of things
body: <h1>Tag values and series cardinality</h1>
  
  <p>Influxdb creates new series for ever combination of (tag, value) pair that it sees.  An <a href="https://docs.influxdata.com/influxdb/v1.7/concepts/glossary/#series-cardinality" rel="nofollow noreferrer">example in the documentation</a> shows this with a tag called <code>email</code>.  Series cardinality is a limiting factor on performance.  Independent tags have a multiplicative effect on series cardinality.</p>
  
  <h2>My data</h2>
  
  <p>I process data that naturally breaks down into something I call groups.  Think of it like an advertising network that processes customers' ads, where a customer is a "group".  I'd like to track how much time and resources different groups take to process.  I currently have about 1000 groups and I'm working on growth planning, so let's suppose I might soon have 10's or 100's of thousands.  There are other tags with 10's or 100's of values (e.g., hostname).  These things are all important to being able to understand our data.</p>
  
  <p>I currently have a half million series.  I don't think I have a lot of data.  I'm running influxdb 1.2.4, looks like our influx version isn't being updated too frequently.</p>
  
  <h2>My question</h2>
  
  <p>This seems like a relatively ordinary need, but it also seems to be one that is going to get me in trouble with influxdb.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Am I confused that I'm heading for pain?</li>
  <li>Is there a better way to address this need?</li>
  <li>Am I outright using the wrong tool?</li>
  </ul>