Epsilon3 Powers Mission-Critical Electronic Procedures with InfluxDB
Epsilon3 provides software for managing complex operational procedures in aerospace and other high-reliability industries. Its platform helps teams plan, execute, and track mission-critical operations through collaborative digital workflows.
REGION
North America
INDUSTRY
Aerospace / Space Operations Software
PRODUCTS
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Mission Operations Demand Real-Time Precision
Managing space operations requires tracking thousands of signals simultaneously. In this environment, uncertainty is a luxury teams don’t have. If telemetry lags or a packet drops during a critical procedure, the mission is at risk.
Epsilon3 provides an AI-powered platform that unifies procedure execution, telemetry monitoring, and operational coordination into a single environment. Its platform is used by leading space organizations, including NASA, Blue Origin, and Axiom, and the team has supported over 100 space launches, including missions to the International Space Station.
“It’s the human interface to the satellite,” said Jon Cox, Principal Software Engineer at Epsilon3.
Operators execute electronic procedures while viewing live telemetry, and steps can automatically pause until systems reach predefined conditions. This ensures teams progress safely while maintaining a precise, time-aligned record of both actions and system behavior.
As customers began using the platform for interactive telemetry analysis—during live missions and offline testing—the underlying data architecture became critical. The platform needed to ingest thousands of data points per second across concurrent streams to support fast, exploratory analysis of historical data.
The team evaluated general-purpose relational databases but encountered both query complexity and scalability challenges when performing time series operations, such as downsampling while preserving local minima and maxima.
We looked at using vanilla Postgres and storing telemetry in tables, Our concern was that performance would degrade exponentially as the volume of time series grew, leading to query timeouts during active missions.”
Software Engineer at Epsilon3
Challenge
Enabling Real-Time Operational Control at Scale
Supporting real-time operations required a telemetry platform that could deliver speed, reliability, and scale simultaneously. Key requirements included:
- Ingesting, storing, and analyzing real-time and historical telemetry at scale
- Delivering interactive visualization of 1,000 Hz telemetry streams for both live mission monitoring and deep-dive offline testing
- Near-instantaneous downsampling for gigabytes of data so engineers could explore large datasets quickly
- Embedding a centralized, time-aligned view of system performance directly within electronic procedures
- Ensuring zero-downtime during mission-critical windows
- Scaling from early deployments to enterprise-grade production environments
- Enabling advanced analytics as a premium capability
Enter InfluxDB
The Telemetry Backbone
Epsilon3 selected InfluxDB as the foundation for telemetry storage and querying across the platform.
The team initially validated the architecture using the open source version of InfluxDB to confirm technical feasibility and performance. Once proven, they deployed a clustered production configuration to meet the aerospace industry’s rigorous reliability requirements.
Availability was the primary driver for the production deployment. Epsilon3’s customers may be executing procedures at any time, so telemetry systems must remain online and fully operational even during infrastructure updates.
We needed true uptime guarantees. Our platform runs on Kubernetes, so we have to cycle nodes for updates without taking telemetry offline. InfluxDB lets us do that without disrupting operations.”
Principal Site Reliability Engineer at Epsilon3
Result
Delivering Real-Time Visibility Without Disruption
With InfluxDB, Epsilon3 gained the ability to ingest continuous telemetry and query both recent and historical data with low latency. This enabled real-time visualization and analysis directly alongside executing procedures, eliminating the need to switch tools during critical operations.
InfluxDB now serves as the telemetry backbone powering Epsilon3’s “Analyze” product, a premium capability that extends the platform beyond procedure execution into deep operational insight. Analyze enables customers to:
- Correlate Actions and Outcomes: By exploring live and historical data tied directly to procedural steps, teams can instantly correlate operator actions with system behavior. What used to take hours of manual log-combing is now instantaneous.
- Interact with data at operational speed: Engineers expect actions like zooming into specific time windows or plotting multiple signals to “feel instantaneous.” InfluxDB’s query performance allows Epsilon3 to render complex, interactive charts that support real-time and post-test exploratory analysis.
- Automate via Real-Time System State: By pairing electronic procedures with real-time telemetry stored in InfluxDB, steps can wait on physical conditions and advance only when systems reach defined states.
Procedures can automatically advance once conditions are met. That capability depends on InfluxDB - Without a reliable place to store and retrieve the data in real-time, the automation simply wouldn’t work.”
Software Engineer at Epsilon3
What’s Next
A Foundation for Future Missions
By integrating telemetry directly into procedure execution, Epsilon3 enables teams to make informed decisions in real-time without leaving the operational workflow. Engineers and operators can monitor system behavior in context, validate outcomes, and make decisions without pausing or shifting to external tools.
InfluxDB delivers the scalable, enterprise-ready foundation that supports Epsilon3’s focus on accuracy, availability, and operational continuity in high-stakes environments.
Together, Epsilon3 and InfluxDB enable organizations across aerospace and other precision-critical industries to execute complex operations with the visibility, reliability, and control required when the stakes are the highest.
