Speaker
Description
The ESAC Science Data Centre (ESDC) develops, hosts and operates the science archives for the majority of ESA’s Space Science Missions, covering Astronomy, Planetary Science, Heliophysics and Human Robotic Exploration (HRE). Each archive aims to maximise the scientific exploitation of its datasets while ensuring their efficient long-term preservation.
A key performance indicator used by decision makers for every archive has always been to report a set of basic usage metrics. Historically it has been difficult to identify and define common usage metrics across all missions due to varying factors. This has led over time to fragmented and inconsistent approaches for capturing statistics, with some legacy archives still relying on manual processes to produce the required reports.
Likewise, understanding new trends in archive usage or obtaining deeper insights into our operational systems is often time-consuming and requires significant developer effort.
As the ESDC transitions towards a common multi-mission platform providing services and user interfaces to access data from ESA Space Science missions, it becomes essential to have a homogeneous approach to observability across the ESDC. This will enable us to accurately capture user and system metrics, assess the availability and performance of applications at all levels, facilitate incident investigation, analyse user behaviour, identify operational and capacity risks, and drive the continuous improvement of our services.
This presentation outlines the vision, architecture and implementation strategy for combining logs, metrics, health checks, synthetic monitoring and usage analytics into a shared, maintainable observability platform.