Usage of Time Series Databases in the Grafana Platform for the Netis Service

NetIs is a service used to monitor the Data Acquisition network of the ATLAS experiment. The first version was developed at CERN in 2010. Over the years, the need to replace NetIs with an improved service emerged. Indeed, the effort to maintain NetIs has considerably increased together with the size and complexity of the network system; additionally, the Round Robin Database (RRD) used to store the data results in a loss of granularity over time that makes the tool unsuitable for retrieving accurate values from the past. The graphs produced by NetIs are generated by the backend server and they are quite static, though the GUI is familiar to many users. The main idea was to exploit the recent advancements in time series databases and visualization tools like Grafana in order to present data to the users in a more dynamic way. The Persistent Back-End for the ATLAS Information System (P-BEAST), developed in ATLAS for permanent storage of operational data, was already integrated with Grafana and successfully collecting network monitoring statistics. Grafana, despite being a very popular visualization web application, does not support some GUI elements that are used in NetIs such as a tree or position of drop-down. Javascript code integrated with Grafana was used to overcome these limitations.