Ausgrid was formed in 2011 and is the largest distributor of electricity on Australia’s east coast. They own, maintain and operate the electrical networks in Sydney, the Central Coast and Hunter regions of New South Wales, Australia. Their network is made up of substations, powerlines, underground cables and power poles — spanning 22,275 square kilometers — and provides power to over 1.8 million customers.

Ausgrid discovered InfluxDB and the difference a purpose-built time series database makes when realizing they needed to replace an expensive, data historian and PI system, OSIsoft, with a modern, powerful, open source alternative.

The team at Ausgrid found OSIsoft rather expensive. Although it was good at querying data for a single point, it would grind to a halt when querying across a large number of tags; for example, when given the query “what is the 1st percentile, average, min., max., 99th percentile voltage across all voltage points for the last day”. The first business user that Mark Langa, software developer at Ausgrid, engaged with claimed that in OSIsoft, that exact query took roughly 24 hours but that in InfluxDB, the same query took roughly 20 seconds - an astronomical difference.

Beyond this, the team at Ausgrid found InfluxDB easy to install and appreciated how quickly they could begin capturing data. With InfluxDB, Ausgrid is able to do fast queries across all monitoring devices, enable business users to start querying data, and quickly visualize data with dashboards and share it with users.