One of the key goals of MetrANOVA — developed by a partnership of the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet), GÉANT, Indiana University, Internet2, and the Texas Advanced Computing Center — is to identify a timeseries datastore that meets the R&E community’s needs as much as possible.
At the 2025 Internet2 Technology Exchange (TechEX25), held Dec. 8-12 in Denver, Colo., attendees will hear from members of the ESnet team about how MetrANOVA selected and tested its measurement tools and how they operate in practice.
ESnet group lead Ed Balas and developers James Kafader and Andy Lake lead the session “MetrANOVA Datasource Benchmarking” on Tuesday, Dec. 9, and invite TechEX25 attendees to learn about their network tool discovery process.
“Network measurements can present several challenges, like how to store and retrieve large data streams efficiently, such as network flows,” said James. “At our session, we will introduce our software stack in greater detail and share our efforts to assess the performance and feature sets of available open source time series-capable databases.”
The MetrANOVA team evaluated several data store tools, including Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, ClickHouse, TimescaleDB, and MongoDB. At their session on Dec. 9, the speakers will present comparisons between the different tools they used and offer evaluations.
If your institution is actively seeking network measurement tools — or you know you will have to start looking in the near future — this session will be valuable to you.
Ahead of the TechEX25 session, Ed provided a preview of the new knowledge attendees will take away.
Ed Balas, Group Lead, ESnet
Are there other sessions at TechEX that you’re excited to attend?
“Network Troubleshooting with Generative AI” and “Experiences with Streaming Telemetry in Production” are two that I’m looking forward to.
James Kafader, Developer, ESnet
Are there other sessions at TechEX that you’re excited to attend?
I’m looking forward to getting some more information and experience with CoManage and Federated ID tooling.
Andy Lake, Developer, ESnet
Are there other sessions at TechEX that you’re excited to attend?
I look forward to hearing about the latest developments in perfSONAR as it celebrates its 20th anniversary. We’re hoping MetrANOVA will have a similar longevity in our community!
Why is
it important for MetrANOVA to find a datastore right now?
Ed: This is a critical time for MetrANOVA to evaluate and select a
datastore, given the evolving open source landscape and ongoing community needs.
As we work
toward building a shared platform, it will be vital for us all to have high confidence that we selected the
best balance of cost and performance, both up-front and in the long term. This work will inform everything
we do moving forward.
Some participants are also seeking a near-term strategy for their
institutional data. In the open source space, we are seeing shifts again in some data store providers’
terms, while others are maturing rapidly.
What are
some key points you will cover in your session?
Ed: We have evaluated five commonly used scalable databases for
their suitability in handling both flow data and port metrics.
As part of this presentation, we
will share the datastore we have selected. We plan to release the software stack to the public
soon.
We also have methodology and performance data that we will make available. Using this data,
we have created a resource planning spreadsheet to help users estimate the resources needed for their
environment.
What are
some takeaways you want attendees to walk away with after your session?
Ed: It is important for everyone to know that MetrANOVA provides
both technical guidance and solutions for network measurement.
The consortium is for everybody in
the R&E community to utilize. It doesn’t matter whether your network is small, medium-sized, or
large.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway for attendees is that we will have a beta software stack you
can run very soon — and we will preview it during our session.
Advanced Networking and More at TechEX25
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