Ingesting non-numerical data

[3ene]

I'm currently building an app that allows ingestion of known IPs that are sources of attacks. My current solutions is ingesting it as a dimension in a metric (as specified here), but that seems a little 'hack-y' to me.

Is there a better way to ingest non-numerical data?

Thank you.

[christian_barth]

Hi, 

This depends a little bit on how you want to use the ingested data after the ingestion.

You could ingest them as BizEvents , allowing you to define an object structure for the data. But similarly to Metrics, events are tied to a timestamp. 

If you only want to use it within your app, maybe AppState would be an option. 

Maybe you describe your use-case in more detail, so I can you even more insights. 

Cheers

Christian

[AlexanderSommer · Accepted solution]

"known IPs that are sources of attacks" sounds like this is a lookup data source. At this point in time we support logs, events (including bizevents), spans and metrics with Grail. All these data types are immutable and have a strong relation to time. 
Grail will support such lookup tables or snapshots at some point next year. If you can update this know IP's every day you might be able to use events as workaround.

[3ene]

Cool, thanks for your answers! While AppState (and Metrics, which I'm currently using) are workarounds, I feel like snapshots are the actually correct way to ingest this kind of data.

Thank you for the explanation!