MONARC: Supervising the Archiving Infrastructure of CERN Control Systems

The CERN industrial control systems, using WinCC OA as SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition), share a common history data archiving system relying on an Oracle infrastructure. It consists of 2 clusters of two nodes for a total of more than 250 schemas. Due to the large number of schemas and of the shared nature of the infrastructure, three basic needs arose: (1) monitor, i.e. get the inventory of all DB nodes and schemas along with their configurations such as the type of partitioning and their retention period; (2) control, i.e. parameterise each schema individually; and (3) supervise, i.e. have an overview of the health of the infrastructure and be notified of misbehaving schemas or database node. In this publication, we are presenting a way to monitor, control and supervise the data archiving system based on a classical SCADA system. The paper is organized in three parts: the first part presents the main functionalities of the application, while the second part digs into its architecture and implementation. The third part presents a set of use cases demonstrating the benefit of using the application.