CERN Alarms Data Management: State And Improvements

The CERN Alarms System - LASER is a centralized service ensuring the capturing, storing and notification of anomalies for the whole accelerator chain, including the technical infrastructure at CERN. The underlying database holds the pre-defined configuration data for the alarm definitions, for the Operators alarms consoles as well as the time-stamped, run-time alarm events, propagated through the Alarms Systems. The article will discuss the current state of the Alarms database and recent improvements that have been introduced. It will look into the data management challenges related to the alarms configuration data that is taken from numerous sources. Specially developed Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) processes must be applied to this data in order to transform it into an appropriate format and load it into the Alarms database. The recorded alarms events together with some additional data, necessary for providing events statistics to users, are transferred to the long-term alarms archive.The article will cover as well the data management challenges related to the recently developed suite of data management interfaces in respect of keeping data consistency between the alarms configuration data coming from external data sources and the data modifications introduced by the end-users.