A service for storing time series data provides a data pipe for receiving time series data, a query pipe for making requests to the service, and a result pipe for receiving output from the service. Data sent to the query pipe is processed by an ingester that prepares metadata indices associated with blocks of incoming time series data and stores the blocks of data in a time series database and the indices in a separate index database. A query layer receives queries from the query pipe and uses the index database to determine which data blocks are needed to process the query, and then requests only those data blocks from the time series database. Processing of the query is performed within the time series database only on those data nodes that contain relevant data, and partial results are passed to an output layer for formation into a final query result which is sent out by the results pipe.