Seadrill

Seadrill Unlocks Real-Time Insight from Offshore Rigs with InfluxDB

Seadrill is a global offshore drilling contractor operating a fleet of modern drillships, semi-submersibles, and jack-up rigs for major oil companies and independent operators. With a focus on operational excellence and safety, Seadrill built Plato, a proprietary analytics platform, to turn real-time rig telemetry into actionable insights for both onboard crews and onshore teams.

In 2023, Seadrill adopted high-speed satellite broadband enabling each rig to begin streaming 15,000 to 22,000 time series, many with sub-second latency. The problem was that the Plato platform’s existing data architecture (data historians and relational databases) were unable to ingest the volumes of high resolution time series data. Historical queries were unreliable, post-processing was slow, and real-time analysis simply couldn’t scale.

Seadrill replaced relational databases and data historians with InfluxDB Enterprise, making Plato the backbone of its real-time operating center, delivering fleet-wide visibility and responsiveness. The platform ingests tens of thousands of time series per second from rig SCADA systems, enabling fast queries across power, fuel, emissions, and safety-critical systems. Engineers onshore and offshore can spot anomalies, analyze trends, and act instantly. Dashboards help crews optimize engines, cut fuel burn, and monitor BOP events and alarms in real time. InfluxDB also unlocked years of historical data, turning multi-day post-processing into minutes.

InfluxDB Enterprise helped Plato achieve its goal of data democratization, getting critical information to the right people, from rig crews to onshore engineers. With access to real-time and historical time-series data, Seadrill shifted from calendar-based to condition-based maintenance, saving an estimated $55 million in asset lifecycle costs. Operational teams used the platform to optimize performance, achieving up to 30% efficiency gains on select rigs. In one case, real-time visibility helped avoid an unplanned shutdown, saving over $6 million.