A lot of data is best represented as time series: Operational data, financial data, and even in data warehouses the dominant dimension is often time. We present Chronix, a time series database based on Apache Solr and Spark which is able to handle trillions of time series data points and perform interactive queries. Chronix Spark is open source software and battle-proven at a German car manufacturer and an international telco. We demonstrate several use cases of Chronix from real-life. Afterwards we lift the curtain and deep-dive into the Chronix architecture esp. how we're using Solr to store time series data and how we've hooked up Solr with Spark. We provide some benchmarks showing how Chronix has outperformed other time series databases in both performance and storage-efficiency. Chronix is open source under the Apache License (http://chronix.io).

1. O C T O B E R 1 1 - 1 4 , 2 0 1 6 • B O S T O N , M A

2. Time Series Processing with Solr and Spark
Josef Adersberger (@adersberger)
CTO, QAware

3. TIME SERIES 101

4. 4
01
WE’RE SURROUNDED BY TIME SERIES
▸ Operational data: Monitoring data, performance
metrics, log events, …
▸ Data Warehouse: Dimension time
▸ Measured Me: Activity tracking, ECG, …
▸ Sensor telemetry: Sensor data, …
▸ Financial data: Stock charts, …
▸ Climate data: Temperature, …
▸ Web tracking: Clickstreams, …
▸ …
@adersberger

5. 5
WE’RE SURROUNDED BY TIME SERIES (Pt. 2)
▸ Oktoberfest: Visitor and beer consumption trend
the singularity

6. 6
01
TIME SERIES: BASIC TERMS
univariate time series multivariate time series multi-dimensional time
series (time series tensor)
time series setobservation
@adersberger

7. 7
01
ILLUSTRATIVE OPERATIONS ON TIME SERIES
align
Time series => Time series
diff downsampling outlier
min/max avg/med slope std-dev
Time series => Scalar
@adersberger

8. OUR USE CASE

9. Monitoring Data Analysis
of a business-critical,
worldwide distributed
software system. Enable
root cause analysis and
anomaly detection.
> 1,000 nodes worldwide
> 10 processes per node
> 20 metrics per process
(OS, JVM, App-spec.)
Measured every second.
= about 6.3 trillions observations p.a.
Data retention: 5 yrs.

11. 11
01
USE CASE: EXPLORING
Drill-down
host
process
measurements
counters (metrics)
Query time series metadata
Superimpose time series
@adersberger

12. 12
01
USE CASE: STATISTICS
@adersberger

13. 13
01
USE CASE: ANOMALY DETECTION
Featuring Twitter Anomaly Detection (https://github.com/twitter/AnomalyDetection
and Yahoo EGDAS https://github.com/yahoo/egads
@adersberger

14. 14
01
USE CASE: SQL AND ZEPPELIN
@adersberger

15. CHRONIX SPARK
https://github.com/ChronixDB/chronix.spark

17. http://www.datasciencecentral.com

19. 19
01
AVAILABLE TIME SERIES DATABASES
https://github.com/qaware/big-data-landscape

20. EASY-TO-USE BIG TIME
SERIES DATA STORAGE &
PROCESSING ON SPARK

21. 21
01
THE CHRONIX STACK chronix.io
Big time series database
Scale-out
Storage-efficient
Interactive queries
No separate servers: Drop-in
to existing Solr and Spark
installations
Integrated into the relevant
open source ecosystem
@adersberger
Core
Chronix Storage
Chronix Server
Chronix Spark
ChronixFormat
GrafanaChronix Analytics
Collection
Analytics Frontends
Logstash fluentd collectd
Zeppelin
Prometheus Ingestion Bridge
KairosDB OpenTSDBInfluxDB Graphite

22. 22
node
Distributed Data &
Data Retrieval
‣ Data sharding
‣ Fast index-based queries
‣ Efficient storage format
Distributed Processing
‣ Heavy lifting distributed
processing
‣ Efficient integration of Spark
and Solr
Result Processing
Post-processing on a
smaller set of time series
data flow
icon credits to Nimal Raj (database), Arthur Shlain (console) and alvarobueno (takslist)
@adersberger

23. 23
TIME SERIES MODEL
Set of univariate multi-dimensional numeric time series
▸ set … because it’s more flexible and better to parallelise if operations can input and
output multiple time series.
▸ univariate … because multivariate will introduce too much complexity (and we have our
set to bundle multiple time series).
▸ multi-dimensional … because the ability to slice & dice in the set of time series is very
convenient for a lot of use cases.
▸ numeric … because it’s the most common use case.
A single time series is identified by a combination of its non-temporal
dimensional values (e.g. unit “mem usage” + host “aws42” + process “tomcat”)
@adersberger

24. 24
01
CHRONIX SPARK API: ENTRY POINTS
CHRONIX SPARK
ChronixRDD
ChronixSparkContext
‣ Represents a set of time series
‣ Distributed operations on sets of time series
‣ Creates ChronixRDDs
‣ Speaks with the Chronix Server (Solr)
@adersberger

25. 25
01
CHRONIX SPARK API: DATA MODEL
MetricTimeSeries
MetricObservationDataFrame
+ toDataFrame()
@adersberger
Dataset<MetricTimeSeries>
Dataset<MetricObservation>
+ toDataset()
+ toObservationsDataset()
ChronixRDD

26. 26
01
SPARK APIs FOR DATA PROCESSING
RDD DataFrame Dataset
typed yes no yes
optimized medium highly highly
mature yes yes medium
SQL no yes no
@adersberger

27. 27
01
CHRONIX RDD
Statistical operations
the set characteristic:
a JavaRDD of
MetricTimeSeries
Filter the set (esp. by
dimensions)
@adersberger

28. 28
01
METRICTIMESERIES DATA TYPE
access all timestamps
the multi-dimensionality:
get/set dimensions
(attributes)
access all observations as
stream
access all numeric values
@adersberger

30. 30
01
//Create Chronix Spark context from a SparkContext / JavaSparkContext
ChronixSparkContext csc = new ChronixSparkContext(sc);
//Read data into ChronixRDD
SolrQuery query = new SolrQuery(
"metric:"java.lang:type=Memory/HeapMemoryUsage/used"");
ChronixRDD rdd = csc.query(query,
"localhost:9983", //ZooKeeper host
"chronix", //Solr collection for Chronix
new ChronixSolrCloudStorage());
//Calculate the overall min/max/mean of all time series in the RDD
double min = rdd.min();
double max = rdd.max();
double mean = rdd.mean();
DataFrame df = rdd.toDataFrame(sqlContext);
DataFrame res = df
.select("time", "value", "process", "metric")
.where("process='jenkins-jolokia'")
.orderBy("time");
res.show();
@adersberger

31. CHRONIX SPARK INTERNALS

32. 32
Distributed Data &
Data Retrieval
‣ Data sharding (OK)
‣ Fast index-based queries (OK)
‣ Efficient storage format
@adersberger

33. 33
01
CHRONIX FORMAT: CHUNKING TIME SERIES
TIME SERIES
‣ start: TimeStamp
‣ end: TimeStamp
‣ dimensions: Map<String, String>
‣ observations: byte[]
TIME SERIES
‣ start: TimeStamp
‣ end: TimeStamp
‣ dimensions: Map<String, String>
‣ observations: byte[]
Logical
TIME SERIES
‣ start: TimeStamp
‣ end: TimeStamp
‣ dimensions: Map<String, String>
‣ observations: byte[]
Physical
Chunking:
1 logical time series =
n physical time series (chunks)
1 chunk = fixed amount of
observations
1 chunk = 1 Solr document
@adersberger

34. 34
01
CHRONIX FORMAT: ENCODING OF OBSERVATIONS
Binary encoding of all timestamp/value pairs (observations) with ProtoBuf incl.
binary compression.
Delta encoding leading to more effective binary compression
… of time stamps (DCC, Date-Delta-Compaction)
… of values: diff
chunck
• timespan
• nbr. of observations
periodic distributed time stamps (pts): timespan / nbr. of observations
real time stamps (rts) if |pts(x) - rts(x)| < threshold : rts(x) = pts(x)
value_to_store = pts(x) - rts(x)
value_to_store = value(x) - value(x-1)
@adersberger

35. 35
01
CHRONIX FORMAT: TUNING CHUNK SIZE AND CODEC
GZIP +
128
kBytes
Florian Lautenschlager, Michael Philippsen, Andreas Kumlehn, Josef Adersberger
Chronix: Efficient Storage and Query of Operational Time Series
International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution 2016 (submitted)
@adersberger
storage
demand access
time

36. 36
01
CHRONIX FORMAT: STORAGE EFFICIENCY BENCHMARK
@adersberger

37. 37
01
CHRONIX FORMAT: PERFORMANCE BENCHMARK
unit: secondsnbr of queries query
@adersberger

38. 38
Distributed Processing
‣ Heavy lifting distributed
processing
‣ Efficient integration of Spark
and Solr
@adersberger

39. 39
01
SPARK AND SOLR BEST PRACTICES: ALIGN PARALLELISM
SolrDocument
(Chunk)
Solr Shard Solr Shard
TimeSeries TimeSeries TimeSeries TimeSeries TimeSeries
Partition Partition
ChronixRDD
• Unit of parallelism in Spark: Partition
• Unit of parallelism in Solr: Shard
• 1 Spark Partition = 1 Solr Shard
SolrDocument
(Chunk)
SolrDocument
(Chunk)
SolrDocument
(Chunk)
SolrDocument
(Chunk)
SolrDocument
(Chunk)
SolrDocument
(Chunk)
SolrDocument
(Chunk)
SolrDocument
(Chunk)
SolrDocument
(Chunk)
@adersberger

40. 40
01
ALIGN THE PARALLELISM WITHIN CHRONIXRDD
public ChronixRDD queryChronixChunks(
final SolrQuery query,
final String zkHost,
final String collection,
final ChronixSolrCloudStorage<MetricTimeSeries> chronixStorage)
throws SolrServerException, IOException {
// first get a list of replicas to query for this collection
List<String> shards = chronixStorage.getShardList(zkHost, collection);
// parallelize the requests to the shards
JavaRDD<MetricTimeSeries> docs = jsc.parallelize(shards, shards.size()).flatMap(
(FlatMapFunction<String, MetricTimeSeries>) shardUrl -> chronixStorage.streamFromSingleNode(
new KassiopeiaSimpleConverter(), shardUrl, query)::iterator);
return new ChronixRDD(docs);
}
Figure out all Solr
shards (using
CloudSolrClient in
the background)
Query each shard in parallel and convert
SolrDocuments to MetricTimeSeries
@adersberger

41. 41
01
SPARK AND SOLR BEST PRACTICES: PUSHDOWN
SolrQuery query = new SolrQuery(
“<Solr query containing filters and aggregations>");
ChronixRDD rdd = csc.query(query, …
@adersberger
Predicate pushdown
• Pre-filter time series based on their
metadata (dimensions, start, end)
with Solr.
Aggregation pushdown
• Perform pre-aggregations (min/max/avg/…) at
ingestion time and store it as metadata.
• (to come) Perform aggregations on Solr-level at
query time by enabling Solr to decode
observations

42. 42
01
SPARK AND SOLR BEST PRACTICES: EFFICIENT DATA TRANSFER
Reduce volume: Pushdown & compression
Use efficient protocols:
Low-overhead, bulk, stream
Avoid remote transfer: Place Spark
tasks (processes 1 partition) on the
Solr node with the appropriate shard.
(to come by using SolrRDD)
@adersberger
Export
Handler
Chronix
RDD
CloudSolr
Stream
Format
Decoder
bulk of
JSON tuples
Chronix Spark
Solr / SolrJ

43. 43
private Stream<MetricTimeSeries>
streamWithCloudSolrStream(String zkHost, String collection, String shardUrl, SolrQuery query,
TimeSeriesConverter<MetricTimeSeries> converter)
throws IOException {
Map params = new HashMap();
params.put("q", query.getQuery());
params.put("sort", "id asc");
params.put("shards", extractShardIdFromShardUrl(shardUrl));
params.put("fl",
Schema.DATA + ", " + Schema.ID + ", " + Schema.START + ", " + Schema.END +
", metric, host, measurement, process, ag, group");
params.put("qt", "/export");
params.put("distrib", false);
CloudSolrStream solrStream = new CloudSolrStream(zkHost, collection, params);
solrStream.open();
SolrTupleStreamingService tupStream = new SolrTupleStreamingService(solrStream, converter);
return StreamSupport.stream(
Spliterators.spliteratorUnknownSize(tupStream, Spliterator.SIZED), false);
}
Pin query to one shard
Use export request handler
Boilerplate code to stream response
@adersberger

44. Time Series Databases should be first-class citizens.
Chronix leverages Solr and Spark to
be storage efficient and to allow interactive
queries for big time series data.

45. THANK YOU! QUESTIONS?
Mail: josef.adersberger@qaware.de
Twitter: @adersberger
TWITTER.COM/QAWARE - SLIDESHARE.NET/QAWARE

46. BONUS SLIDES

47. PERFORMANCE

48. codingvoding.tumblr.com

49. PREMATURE OPTIMIZATION IS
NOT EVIL IF YOU HANDLE BIG
DATA
Josef Adersberger

50. PERFORMANCE
USING A JAVA PROFILER WITH A LOCAL CLUSTER

51. PERFORMANCE
HIGH-PERFORMANCE, LOW-OVERHEAD COLLECTIONS

52. PERFORMANCE
830 MB -> 360 MB
(- 57%)
unveiled wrong Jackson
handling inside of SolrClient

53. 53
01
THE SECRETS OF DISTRIBUTED PROCESSING PERFORMANCE
Rule 1: Be as close to the data as possible!
(CPU cache > memory > local disk > network)
Rule 2: Reduce data volume as early as possible!
(as long as you don’t sacrifice parallelization)
Rule 3: Parallelize as much as possible!
(max = #cores * x)

54. PERFORMANCE
THE RULES APPLIED
‣ Rule 1: Be as close to the data as possible!
1. Solr caching
2. Spark in-memory processing with activated RDD compression
3. Binary protocol between Solr and Spark
‣ Rule 2: Reduce data volume as early as possible!
‣ Efficient storage format (Chronix Format)
‣ Predicate pushdown to Solr (query)
‣ Group-by & aggregation pushdown to Solr (faceting within a query)
‣ Rule 3: Parallelize as much as possible!
‣ Scale-out on data-level with SolrCloud
‣ Scale-out on processing-level with Spark

55. APACHE SPARK 101

56. CHRONIX SPARK WONDERLAND
ARCHITECTURE

57. APACHE SPARK
SPARK TERMINOLOGY (1/2)
▸ RDD: Has transformations and actions. Hides data partitioning &
distributed computation. References a set of partitions (“output
partitions”) - materialized or not - and has dependencies to
another RDD (“input partitions”). RDD operations are evaluated as
late as possible (when an action is called). As long as not being the
root RDD the partitions of an RDD are in memory but they can be
persisted by request.
▸ Partitions: (Logical) chunks of data. Default unit and level of
parallelism - inside of a partition everything is a sequential
operation on records. Has to fit into memory. Can have different
representations (in-memory, on disk, off heap, …)

58. APACHE SPARK
SPARK TERMINOLOGY (2/2)
▸ Job: A computation job which is launched when an action is called on a
RDD.
▸ Task: The atomic unit of work (function). Bound to exactly one partition.
▸ Stage: Set of Task pipelines which can be executed in parallel on one
executor.
▸ Shuffling: If partitions need to be transferred between executors. Shuffle
write = outbound partition transfer. Shuffle read = inbound partition
transfer.
▸ DAG Scheduler: Computes DAG of stages from RDD DAG. Determines
the preferred location for each task.

59. THE COMPETITORS / ALTERNATIVES
CHRONIX RDD VS. SPARK-TS
▸ Spark-TS provides no specific time series storage it uses the Spark persistence
mechanisms instead. This leads to a less efficient storage usage and less possibilities
to perform performance optimizations via predicate pushdown.
▸ In contrast to Spark-TS Chronix does not align all time series values on one vector of
timestamps. This leads to greater flexibility in time series aggregation
▸ Chronix provides multi-dimensional time series as this is very useful for data
warehousing and APM.
▸ Chronix has support for Datasets as this will be an important Spark API in the near
future. But Chronix currently doesn’t support an IndexedRowMatrix for SparkML.
▸ Chronix is purely written in Java. There is no explicit support for Python and Scala yet.
▸ Chronix doesn not support a ZonedTime as this makes it way more complicated.

60. CHRONIX SPARK INTERNALS

61. 61
01
CHRONIXRDD: GET THE CHUNKS FROM SOLR
public ChronixRDD queryChronixChunks(
final SolrQuery query,
final String zkHost,
final String collection,
final ChronixSolrCloudStorage<MetricTimeSeries> chronixStorage)
throws SolrServerException, IOException {
// first get a list of replicas to query for this collection
List<String> shards = chronixStorage.getShardList(zkHost, collection);
// parallelize the requests to the shards
JavaRDD<MetricTimeSeries> docs = jsc.parallelize(shards, shards.size()).flatMap(
(FlatMapFunction<String, MetricTimeSeries>) shardUrl -> chronixStorage.streamFromSingleNode(
new KassiopeiaSimpleConverter(), shardUrl, query)::iterator);
return new ChronixRDD(docs);
}
Figure out all Solr
shards (using
CloudSolrClient in
the background)
Query each shard in parallel and convert
SolrDocuments to MetricTimeSeries

62. 62
01
BINARY PROTOCOL WITH STANDARD SOLR CLIENT
private Stream<MetricTimeSeries> streamWithHttpSolrClient(String shardUrl,
SolrQuery query,
TimeSeriesConverter<MetricTimeSeries>
converter) {
HttpSolrClient solrClient = getSingleNodeSolrClient(shardUrl);
solrClient.setRequestWriter(new BinaryRequestWriter());
query.set("distrib", false);
SolrStreamingService<MetricTimeSeries> solrStreamingService =
new SolrStreamingService<>(converter, query, solrClient, nrOfDocumentPerBatch);
return StreamSupport.stream(
Spliterators.spliteratorUnknownSize(solrStreamingService, Spliterator.SIZED), false);
}
Use HttpSolrClient pinned to one shard
Use binary (request)
protocol
Boilerplate code to stream response

63. 63
private Stream<MetricTimeSeries>
streamWithCloudSolrStream(String zkHost, String collection, String shardUrl, SolrQuery query,
TimeSeriesConverter<MetricTimeSeries> converter)
throws IOException {
Map params = new HashMap();
params.put("q", query.getQuery());
params.put("sort", "id asc");
params.put("shards", extractShardIdFromShardUrl(shardUrl));
params.put("fl",
Schema.DATA + ", " + Schema.ID + ", " + Schema.START + ", " + Schema.END +
", metric, host, measurement, process, ag, group");
params.put("qt", "/export");
params.put("distrib", false);
CloudSolrStream solrStream = new CloudSolrStream(zkHost, collection, params);
solrStream.open();
SolrTupleStreamingService tupStream = new SolrTupleStreamingService(solrStream, converter);
return StreamSupport.stream(
Spliterators.spliteratorUnknownSize(tupStream, Spliterator.SIZED), false);
}
EXPORT HANDLER PROTOCOL
Pin query to one shard
Use export request handler
Boilerplate code to stream response

64. 64
01
CHRONIXRDD: FROM CHUNKS TO TIME SERIES
public ChronixRDD joinChunks() {
JavaPairRDD<MetricTimeSeriesKey, Iterable<MetricTimeSeries>> groupRdd
= this.groupBy(MetricTimeSeriesKey::new);
JavaPairRDD<MetricTimeSeriesKey, MetricTimeSeries> joinedRdd
= groupRdd.mapValues((Function<Iterable<MetricTimeSeries>, MetricTimeSeries>) mtsIt -> {
MetricTimeSeriesOrdering ordering = new MetricTimeSeriesOrdering();
List<MetricTimeSeries> orderedChunks = ordering.immutableSortedCopy(mtsIt);
MetricTimeSeries result = null;
for (MetricTimeSeries mts : orderedChunks) {
if (result == null) {
result = new MetricTimeSeries
.Builder(mts.getMetric())
.attributes(mts.attributes()).build();
}
result.addAll(mts.getTimestampsAsArray(), mts.getValuesAsArray());
}
return result;
});
JavaRDD<MetricTimeSeries> resultJavaRdd =
joinedRdd.map((Tuple2<MetricTimeSeriesKey, MetricTimeSeries> mtTuple) -> mtTuple._2);
return new ChronixRDD(resultJavaRdd); }
group chunks
according
identity
join chunks to
logical time
series