Grafana for WinCC-OA based SCADA systems at CERN

WinCC-Open Architecture is a toolkit for creating Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) applications. There are about 650 instances of WinCC OA deployed across the accelerator control systems and experiments at CERN. By default WinCC OA is only aware of the current state of a system; WinCC OA Archiving is used to keep a historical record of changes that occur to the state of the system.

The WinCC OA archiving solutions deployed at CERN, the legacy 'RDB Archiver' and its replacement the 'Next Generation Archiver' (NGA), archive to Oracle databases, and for the most part the design and configuration of these databases is consistent between archivers and across CERN. Monitoring and visualising the data archived to these databases is a vital task.

Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. The goal of this project is to develop a Grafana Datasource that abstracts away the CERN specific Oracle database schema design and hence allows a Grafana user to intuitively retrieve WinCC OA archived data. Any proposed datasource solution must also meet performance and scalability requirements, and meet CERN security standards.

This report details the extensions and modifications to a prototype Grafana datasource to achieve the goals described above. We detail the progression of the work and the technologies and technical solutions used. Additionally we detail several deployment scenarios that address performance and security requirements as they relate to CERN infrastructure, and give details of work completed to automate this deployment.