In this post, the authors from InfluxData share tips for using InfluxDB effectively, including recommendations for writing historical data, setting timestamp precision for writes, and finding log files in various operating systems. For sparse historical data, users can lengthen their retention policy's shard group duration and temporarily lower the cache-snapshot-write-cold-duration configuration setting to make the process more efficient. The authors also explain how to specify a second-precision timestamp when writing data using InfluxDB's CLI, and provide instructions for accessing log files on different operating systems, including systemd and System V.