Frequently asked questions

What is Artesian?

Artesian is a managed service that keeps client-authorised energy information consistent, conformed, versioned and ready for operational use. It acquires, maintains, preserves, conforms, transforms and serves the information each client selects.

Does Artesian sell market data?

No. Artesian is not a data reseller or a data marketplace. Each client selects and licenses its own sources, and Artesian connects to a provider only when the client holds a licence that allows it. A catalogue entry does not grant data rights or establish a provider relationship.

Is my information shared with other clients?

No. Artesian is instantiated for each client: each instance has its own compute, databases and network isolation, holds only that client’s configuration and information, and is not accessible to anyone else. Only the entry proxy, the identity provider and the web interface’s static files are shared between clients. Every access token is issued for a single instance, so no session can reach two instances at once. A user can be authorised on more than one instance, for example for several legal entities in the same group or when ARK provides operational support, but each instance is reached with its own access token.

How is Artesian priced?

Artesian is a monthly subscription for your dedicated instance, on a Standard or an Enterprise plan. Connectors, optional modules and usage are added to the base fee. The Pricing page lists every price, with worked examples.

How much of the invoice is usage?

It depends on how much your applications read. In typical profiles, usage ranges from under 1% of the monthly invoice for occasional use to around 70% for very large Enterprise use. The Pricing page describes five profiles and how much data each reads in a month. Enterprise subscriptions can add the Predictable Billing Option to cap the monthly invoice.

Does storage cost extra?

No. Artesian keeps data in its own storage layer built on cloud object storage, so storage is unlimited and the subscription is the same however much data you archive.

Which types of energy information does Artesian support?

• Actual time series: a single operational value for each observation point.
• Versioned time series: successive submitted values that support time-aware retrieval and reproducible historical analysis.
• Market assessments: assessments sampled from bid-offer activity, typically summarised as candlestick-style aggregations.
• Auction data: bid and offer curves from auctions.
• Bid-ask data: for each traded product, the best bid and ask prices and quantities.
• Derived datasets: reusable operational series computed from selected, conformed inputs.

Which data providers can Artesian connect to?

Configurable connectors acquire or receive information from client-authorised sources, conform it and maintain it in each client’s instance. They react as soon as a source publishes new or revised data and respect each provider’s limits on request frequency and concurrency, so access stays reliable. A small selection from the catalogue:

• Weather and forecasts: AccuWeather, AerisWeather, Meteologica.
• Electricity and gas transparency: ENTSO-E, ENTSOG, Elexon.
• Exchanges and auction platforms: EEX, EPEX SPOT, GME, MIBGAS, OMIE, JAO.
• Transmission and gas-network information: Terna, RTE, Enagás, Snam, Gassco.
• Licensed commercial information: Energy Aspects, ICE, Refinitiv, Trayport, Volue.
• Client-provided files: defined CSV formats.

The full catalogue is much larger and keeps growing. Each client activates the sources it needs under its own licences, and coverage and update frequency follow what each provider publishes. When you need a source of general interest that is not yet in the catalogue, ARK typically builds the connector at no additional cost, depending on the number and complexity of requests: it becomes part of the catalogue available to every client, and ARK retains its intellectual property. ARK then operates it as part of the service, and once active it counts like any other connector in your subscription. Connectors to your own proprietary systems can be built as a separately quoted consulting engagement.

Are there optional modules?

Yes. Each client activates only the modules relevant to its business:

• GME public offers: all public offers published by the Italian energy exchange (Gestore dei Mercati Energetici), ingested automatically, normalised and available in structured form.
• Trayport Data Factory: a connector to the Trayport Trading Gateway. The client must comply with Trayport’s chained-application disclosure requirements and any applicable licence restrictions.
• Italian metering (beta): direct integration with the Sistema Informativo Integrato (SII), operated by Acquirente Unico, for power and gas metering data, including retrieval of distributor invoices and their automatic reconciliation against SII data, plus ARERA tariff components, supporting forecasting, billing and regulatory reporting.
• Data quality management (beta): configurable checks and alerts for completeness, timeliness and outliers.
• Time series derivation (beta): reusable derived series computed from existing ones, such as Coalesce, which selects the first available value from priority-ordered sources.

Is the information delivered in real time?

It depends on the source: Artesian makes information available as each provider publishes it. The service is designed for focused retrieval and operational responsiveness rather than as a general-purpose streaming engine.

Can I see a time series as it was known on a past date?

Yes. Versioned time series keep every published value. The Most Up-to-date Value (MUV) view returns, for each point, the latest value known at the moment you choose, so you can reproduce past analyses exactly while the full version history stays available for audit.

Can series with different time zones, granularities or units be compared?

Yes. Artesian aligns time zones, granularities and units so that series become comparable: some conversions happen when data is ingested, others, such as resampling and time shifting, when it is read.

Does a failed data-quality check change my data?

No. Checks can identify issues such as missing observations, delayed publications and outliers. A failed check flags an issue; it does not replace a value. Users decide whether to apply a correction and whether it is permanent or temporary, and source provenance and correction context can be retained.

How do I know if expected data is late or missing?

You define when data is expected from a source or for an individual series. If it arrives late or not at all, configurable alerts let your team act before it affects your processes.

Is the data-quality example on this website real?

No. The values, check results, authors and comments in the website demonstration are illustrative. No live customer checks or customer data are shown.

How do applications access Artesian?

Through the client-facing API, which supports both reading and writing data. It is the same API Artesian’s own connectors use, so you can publish your own time series and derived data and build Artesian into internal pipelines and automated workflows. Documented query shapes cover actual and versioned time series, market assessments, auction data and bid-ask data; exact operations depend on the library version, the client’s configuration and authorised access.

How is access to data controlled?

Users sign in with an Artesian account or through single sign-on with your organisation’s own directory. Permissions are assigned to users or groups down to the individual series, so each person and system sees only the data assigned to it.

Which SDKs are available?

• C#: public client library, installed through NuGet.
• Python: public client library, installed through PyPI.

An R client is forthcoming.

Repository examples illustrate library use. They are not separate SDKs or service-level commitments.

Where is my information hosted?

By default, Artesian instances run in Microsoft Azure’s North Europe region, in Ireland. Enterprise subscriptions can add zonal redundancy, sized with you around your requirements: the instance is deployed across multiple availability zones within that region and keeps running if a zone fails, with an RTO and RPO of zero.

How is Artesian built?

Artesian is cloud-native and runs on Microsoft Azure. Its services are event-driven and loosely coupled, so each can scale independently, and storage is chosen per data type to balance performance, reliability and long-term retention.