Kasemir, K.-U. JACoW Publishing Geneva, Switzerland 2226-0358 978-3-95450-209-7 10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2019-WESH2001 English 1504-1508 WESH2001 Contribution to a conference proceedings 2020 2020-08 https://doi.org/10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2019-WESH2001 https://jacow.org/icalepcs2019/papers/wesh2001.pdf The CS-Studio alarm system was originally based on a relational database and the Apache ActiveMQ message service. The former was necessary to store configuration and state, while the latter communicated state updates and user actions. In a recent update, the combination of relational database and ActiveMQ have been replaced by Apache Kafka. We present how this simplified the implementation while at the same time improving performance.