About KX Sensors¶
This page introduces KX Sensors and its key features, and outlines what this documentation site covers.
KX Sensors is a high-performance data platform focused on use cases in the energy utilities and manufacturing sectors. It uses the capabilities of kdb+ to analyze terabytes and petabytes of time series data, with added enterprise-level support for scalability, reliability, and operability. With KX Sensors, you can quickly identify abnormalities, detect faults, and predict failures, so you can optimize efficiency, maintain data integrity, and limit downtime.
Whether it's real-time fault detection on the factory floor, or reliable persistence and analysis of electricity usage, KX Sensors is engineered for use cases that combine high ingestion and query volumes with stringent requirements for low latency and high availability.
The architecture is designed for extensibility: KX Sensors lets you layer your customizations on top of a robust framework to deliver value in a repeatable and scalable manner.
About this documentation¶
This site is the operational reference for KX Sensors v3 and above. It covers:
- System architecture and key processes
- Installation prerequisites and configuration
- Day-to-day operations: starting, stopping, and managing nodes and services
- Data ingestion via RT, TP, and enterprise messaging systems
- Monitoring, logging, and observability
- High availability and quorum
- Security and encryption
- Upgrades: dynamic (zero-downtime) and offline
KX Sensors v2 and earlier
If you're using KX Sensors v2 or earlier, contact KX for PDF-based documentation.
Architecture overview¶
KX Sensors uses a layered architecture in which a set of core processes manage data ingestion, storage, query routing, and high availability.
Key features¶
These are some of the key features of KX Sensors:
- KDB-X at the core: Deploy the proven performance of KDB-X, the next generation of kdb+, within an enterprise-level application framework. Handle millions of sensor readings per second to run your real-time analytics at scale. Count on the tiny footprint of the database to keep your infrastructure costs low. KX Sensors runs on KDB-X from v3.3, and on kdb+ in earlier versions — see KX Sensors on KDB-X.
- Scalability: Add process instances and nodes to scale your pipelines and infrastructure horizontally. Use features such as table sharding and intraday processing. Whether it's data ingestion or query volume, KX Sensors can grow with your needs.
- Advanced data and query processing: Use message microbatching to handle high-frequency publishers. Programmatically provide hints to optimize query routing.
- Interoperability: Get data in and out using the Java, C, and C# libraries. Make REST calls, use Python, or replicate your data to external systems.
- Resilience and availability: Engineered for the toughest environments with fully online upgrades, ensuring zero downtime to meet high availability requirements.
- Enterprise-level administration and operability: Automate system management using the command-line interface. Set up alerts, monitor your hardware, set table- or column-level compression and encryption, and migrate your historical data across storage tiers to use more economical storage options as data ages.
- Customizable and flexible: The layered architecture and rapid developer workflow empowers you to build exactly the application you need. Work with kdb+ using the VS Code extension or the IDE of your choice to implement your custom schema, processes, and APIs.