Engineering Facilities Database

The Engineering Facilities Database (EFD) records all interactions between components that occur over the middleware. The database is useful for numerous activities, including: troubleshooting of software or hardware related issues, optimization of observing parameters (e.g. focus as a function of temperature), and recovering useful data that happened during an observation that may not be in the header.

The primary location of the EFD is on the summit, however a separate instance also lives at the base facility in La Serena. Under normal conditions, the data is then synced to the US data facility and available via the science platform in near real time. The US data facility instance is intended to service all needs not related to on summit activities such as controller scripts and tight loop feedback. Direct interaction with the summit EFD is strongly discouraged and should only be used if no other viable option exists.

Note

The current global situation has caused deviation from the above plan. Since the closure of the summit facilities, the summit EFD has been mirrored to another instance running on the base computing infrastructure. This is expected to be a temporary solution and that the primary EFD will move back to the summit when activities resume.

The EFD is backed by InfluxBD, details of the EFD architecture, implementation and deployment(s) are found at https://sqr-034.lsst.io.

Interacting with the EFD

There are two primary user-interfaces to the EFD, Chronograf and the EFD Client. Each endpoint satisfies multiple, but not identical use-cases.

Chronograf

Chronograf is a web-based graphical front-end to the database where users can make simple queries and create plots or graphical representations of data.

Note

To login to Chronograf, you need to be a member of the GitHub lsst-sqre organization. If you are not, please request access on the #com-square LSSTC Slack channel. You will also need access to the appropriate VPN to log in. For information about connecting to the Chilean VPN, please ask on the #rubinobs-it-chile LSSTC Slack channel.

../_images/weather.png

An example Chronograf dashboard showing weather station information on the summit from 1-2 January 2020.

More information on using Chronograf can be found at the getting started page.

EFD Client

The EFD Client permits access to the data from a notebook or python program. This is often the preferred method for more detailed analyses or where record-keeping is required. It contains multiple methods to aid with queries and data interactions, essentially wrapping much of the functionality from aioinflux (the influxDB client).

Accessing the EFD

Following is a list of EFD instances. Please refer https://sqr-034.lsst.io for technical details: e.g. information about connecting directly to the influxDB server API. There are also several instances of the EFD deployed at various places that are unlikely to be of general interest. These are also listed in the aforementioned SQuaRE technical note.

The entry titled “efd_client alias” is the string to pass to the EfdClient constructor in order to authenticate to that instance of the EFD.