The Data Acquisition Service (ACQ) is the heart of the entire SCS system. It is in charge of collection and storage of all sensor data streams being fed into SCS. This is the service which opens all the COM ports and reads the incoming sensor data before saving it to disk and supplying it for consumption by the other services and client displays.
ACQ gets its sensor configuration from CFE and continuously listens to the Configuration hub for announcements regarding configuration changes. In the event the sensor setup changes ACQ will automatically adjust itself to handle the modifications without having to be restarted. In other words, if you add a new sensor or change something in CFE and publish then your changes should be reflected almost immediately by ACQ without any further action on your part.
As ACQ reads and processes the various data streams defined by CFE it actively pushes the sensor data out to multiple targets. The two primary outputs are the backend database for storage and the SignalR Data hub for client visualizations.
The ACQ service should always be running if you want to collect data!
In addition to ingesting all the actual real time sensor data ACQ also calculates any derived interfaces you have defined in CFE along with all the SAMOS averages. It actively monitors resource consumption on the host and will disable sensors which start to overwhelm predefined thresholds. If it finds data streams that it does not recognize it will automatically feed those on to CFE allowing the user to decide if they should be included in the master configuration or ignored.