Install opentsdb with Homebrew, Nix

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• start-tsdb.sh
• tsdb

Project history

OpenTSDB was originally designed and implemented at StumbleUpon by Benoît Sigoure, with early design input from Berk D. Demir. It grew out of the operational need to collect metrics from networks, operating systems, applications, and services at a scale where older fixed-size or single-node monitoring stores were not sufficient.

The project chose HBase because it could distribute writes and scans across a cluster while keeping raw metric points for long periods. Public talks and documentation from the early 2010s emphasized billion-point-per-day ingestion, large numbers of time series, and avoiding the loss of precision common in round-robin databases.

Adoption history

OpenTSDB’s adoption followed the rise of large Hadoop/HBase installations and high-cardinality infrastructure monitoring. Its contributor list includes companies such as StumbleUpon, Yahoo, Box, Arista Networks, Betfair, Limelight Networks, and others, showing use beyond the original StumbleUpon deployment.

Its protocol and data model also outlived some deployments of the original server. Cloud vendors and monitoring tools documented OpenTSDB-compatible ingestion or comparison points because the metric-plus-tags model became a familiar shape for time-series telemetry systems.

How it is used

Operators run one or more independent TSD processes in front of HBase or Google Bigtable-compatible storage. Collectors such as tcollector, collectd, StatsD bridges, or custom scripts send datapoints, while users query and graph by metric, timestamp range, and tags through the HTTP API or built-in UI.

For package users, the interesting pieces are the `tsdb` command, `start-tsdb.sh`, the configuration search path, and the dependency on a correctly prepared HBase schema. Installing the package is only the first step; a usable OpenTSDB deployment depends on distributed storage, collectors, and retention choices.

Why package nerds care

OpenTSDB is a reminder that some packages are operational systems disguised as CLIs. The formula installs Java code and scripts, but the real dependency is an HBase-backed monitoring architecture with schema, collectors, ports, and dashboards.

Timeline

• 2010: OpenTSDB was written at StumbleUpon to handle large-scale service metrics.
• 2012: public talks described StumbleUpon deployments adding over one billion datapoints per day.
• 2014: OpenTSDB 2.0-era material described the project as a distributed, scalable time-series database with broader community involvement.
• 2020s: OpenTSDB 2.4 documentation remained the main reference for the classic HBase-backed architecture.

Related projects

• Related projects include HBase, Google Bigtable, tcollector, collectd, StatsD, Grafana, Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphite, and cloud services that expose OpenTSDB-compatible APIs.

Sources

• https://dbdb.io/db/opentsdb
• https://github.com/OpenTSDB/opentsdb
• https://github.com/OpenTSDB/opentsdb/blob/master/AUTHORS
• https://opentsdb.net/
• https://opentsdb.net/faq.html
• https://opentsdb.net/misc/opentsdb-hbasecon.pdf
• https://opentsdb.net/overview.html
• https://opentsdb.net/schema.html