What is Chronix?
Chronix is an open-source time series database specifically optimized for storing and analyzing large amounts of time-stamped data such as metrics and diagnostic events generated by applications, systems, and devices. It was originally created by Florian Lautenschlager as part of his PhD research at the University of Konstanz in Germany.
The key goal of Chronix is to provide a high-performance database solution for managing time series data that scales easily to extremely large data volumes and query workloads. It uses optimizations like compression, downsampling, and batched writes to achieve efficient storage on spinning disks or flash storage.
A major focus is query efficiency over geo-distributed deployments and very large data sets with minimal latency. Chronix supports SQL-like querying through a REST API, client libraries for Java and C++, and integrations for visualization and analytics tools like Grafana. It can handle upwards of millions of data points per second ingested, stored, compressed, queried, and analyzed in real-time.
Chronix runs as a standalone server or cluster coordinated by Apache ZooKeeper. It stores data on disk in binary files and automatically downsamples older data for compact long-term storage. Replication and automated failover provide resiliency for high availability deployments. Chronix is implemented in Java and released under the Apache License 2.0.