Documentation

Calculate the moving average

This page documents an earlier version of InfluxDB OSS. InfluxDB 3 Core is the latest stable version.

Use the movingAverage() or timedMovingAverage() functions to return the moving average of data.

data
  |> movingAverage(n: 5)

// OR

data
  |> timedMovingAverage(every: 5m, period: 10m)

movingAverage()

For each row in a table, movingAverage() returns the average of the current value and previous values where n is the total number of values used to calculate the average.

If n = 3:

Row #Calculation
1Insufficient number of rows
2Insufficient number of rows
3(Row1 + Row2 + Row3) / 3
4(Row2 + Row3 + Row4) / 3
5(Row3 + Row4 + Row5) / 3

Given the following input:

_time_value
2020-01-01T00:01:00Z1.0
2020-01-01T00:02:00Z1.2
2020-01-01T00:03:00Z1.8
2020-01-01T00:04:00Z0.9
2020-01-01T00:05:00Z1.4
2020-01-01T00:06:00Z2.0

The following would return:

|> movingAverage(n: 3)
_time_value
2020-01-01T00:03:00Z1.33
2020-01-01T00:04:00Z1.30
2020-01-01T00:05:00Z1.36
2020-01-01T00:06:00Z1.43

timedMovingAverage()

For each row in a table, timedMovingAverage() returns the average of the current value and all row values in the previous period (duration). It returns moving averages at a frequency defined by the every parameter.

Each color in the diagram below represents a period of time used to calculate an average and the time a point representing the average is returned. If every = 30m and period = 1h:

0:000:301:001:302:002:303:003:002:302:001:301:000:30

Given the following input:

_time_value
2020-01-01T00:01:00Z1.0
2020-01-01T00:02:00Z1.2
2020-01-01T00:03:00Z1.8
2020-01-01T00:04:00Z0.9
2020-01-01T00:05:00Z1.4
2020-01-01T00:06:00Z2.0

The following would return:

|> timedMovingAverage(
  every: 2m,
  period: 4m
)
_time_value
2020-01-01T00:02:00Z1.000
2020-01-01T00:04:00Z1.333
2020-01-01T00:06:00Z1.325
2020-01-01T00:06:00Z1.150

Was this page helpful?

Thank you for your feedback!


The future of Flux

Flux is going into maintenance mode. You can continue using it as you currently are without any changes to your code.

Read more

New in InfluxDB 3.2

Key enhancements in InfluxDB 3.2 and the InfluxDB 3 Explorer UI is now generally available.

See the Blog Post

InfluxDB 3.2 is now available for both Core and Enterprise, bringing the general availability of InfluxDB 3 Explorer, a new UI that simplifies how you query, explore, and visualize data. On top of that, InfluxDB 3.2 includes a wide range of performance improvements, feature updates, and bug fixes including automated data retention and more.

For more information, check out: