Eutelsat

Managing Satellite Telemetry at Scale: Eutelsat OneWeb + InfluxDB

Eutelsat Group, formed by the 2023 merger of Eutelsat and OneWeb, is a global leader in satellite communications. With over 40 years of experience and €1.13B in FY2022–2023 revenue, the company operates a hybrid constellation of 600+ Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites alongside a robust Geostationary Orbit (GEO) fleet. The company is a pioneer in next-generation, software-driven, all-electric spacecraft and Very High Throughput Satellite (VHTS) technology.

To ensure the safety of its growing constellation, Eutelsat OneWeb’s operations team analyzes high-fidelity telemetry from both spacecraft and ground systems. But when they tried to repurpose their Elasticsearch/Kibana stack for this purpose, it quickly fell short. The platform couldn’t ingest the high volumes of telemetry nor cope with the high cardinality created by metadata required to track millions of unique time series. Kibana struggled with telemetry visualization and proved clumsy when comparing trends or correlating spacecraft and ground behavior. Out-of-order and duplicate data made matters worse, forcing the team to build and maintain custom deduplication code before any meaningful analysis could begin.

Eutelsat OneWeb rebuilt its telemetry architecture using InfluxDB, Telegraf, and Grafana—tools “suitable for what spacecraft produce—time series.” InfluxDB provides a purpose-built engine that ingests millions of points per second, deduplicates out-of-order data, and reliably manages tens of millions of unique series with efficient compression. Telegraf agents standardize data collection across the ground segment, while Grafana delivers responsive, real-time dashboards for trend comparison and space-to-ground correlation. Working alongside InfluxData engineers, the team tuned schema design, partitioning, queries, and performance to make telemetry a consistent, real-time source of operational insight.

With this new InfluxDB-based telemetry platform, Eutelsat OneWeb’s operations team has a unified solution for real-time insight and long-term analysis. Live dashboards track satellite health, side-by-side views combine spacecraft and ground data, and alerts trigger automatically when known anomalies occur.

Looking ahead, the team is layering in event replay, long-term retention via Apache Iceberg, and AI models trained on high-cardinality time series to detect previously unseen failures. By centralizing telemetry and embedding automation, they’re transforming raw data into a continuous source of intelligence, early warning, and competitive advantage. With InfluxDB, the team can “measure everything”—because, as Dan Kroboth, Vice President of LEO Satellite Operations, puts it, “you never know what you’ll need to ask tomorrow.”