tsdb: A Compressed Database for Time Series

Large-scale network monitoring systems require efficient storage and consolidation of measurement data. Relational databases and popular tools such as the Round-Robin Database show their limitations when handling a large number of time series. This is because data access time greatly increases with the cardinality of data and number of measurements. The result is that monitoring systems are forced to store very few metrics at low frequency in order to grant data access within acceptable time boundaries. This paper describes a novel compressed time series database named tsdb whose goal is to allow large time series to be stored and consolidated in realtime with limited disk space usage. The validation has demonstrated the advantage of tsdb over traditional approaches, and has shown that tsdb is suitable for handling a large number of time series.