Read data from InfluxDB

Please see this post for how to share a flow here. You can edit your previous post accordingly rather than posting it again.
However, to answer your question, yes you have to send the node a message to get it to run the query. Often the message will contain data that can modify the query (as described in the info panel for the node), but if the configuration contains a fixed query then any message will do. For testing you can just connect an Inject node to it.