CERN

CERN, located near Geneva, Switzerland, is the European Organization for Nuclear Research. At CERN physicists and engineers are working to determine the fundamental structure of the universe. They do so by studying how particles interact when smashing them together or against stationary things at the speed of light with their Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

CERN wanted to upgrade the data monitoring system for one of its Large Hadron Collider experiments called ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) to ensure the experiment’s high efficiency. They needed to constantly monitor their 2000 nodes processing data at 3.4 TB/s which leads to an incredible ​600 kHz metric rate. These metrics are collected and aggregated by Flume and Spark, and CERN chose InfluxDB to store these metrics.

InfluxDays presentation

CERN presented at InfluxDays London 2018. In this talk, Adam Wegrzynek provided an overview of InfluxDB at CERN. He demonstrated how InfluxDB is critical for various CERN projects including monitoring its accelerator systems, experiments and data centers.

Additional resources

• View Presentation: Adam Wegrzynek’s talk at CHEP 2018 Conference
• Watch Talk: Taming Billions of Metrics and Logs at Scale: Two Years with Kafka as a Central Data Hub for Monitoring at CERN