[atlas] Proposal: Remove support for non-public measurements [ONLY-PUBLIC]

The “one specific user” is www.globaltraceroute.com, an Atlas front end I created a few years ago that does instant one-off traceroutes, pings, and DNS lookups.  It has become a well-used operational troubleshooting tool.  It operates as a free service, with operational costs slowly draining the bank account of my mostly defunct consulting firm, and Atlas credits coming from a couple probes I operate plus some other donors.

What I think is worth considering here:

Atlas, and the RIPE NCC, have two fairly separate constituencies:  researchers and operators.

In the research community, there’s an expectation that data be made available so that others can review it, judge the validity of research results, do their own work based on it, etc.  Atlas, in its native form with long running repeatable measurements, gets a lot of research use.  It is useful to have those datasets available to the public.

The operations use case for Global Traceroute is different.  It’s generally either “I set up a new CDN POP, and want to make sure the networks it’s supposed to serve are getting there are on a direct path,” or “some other source is telling me my performance is bad from ISP X, and I want to know why.”  Instead of calling the other ISP’s NOC or trying to track down a random customer to help troubleshoot, they can do a one-off traceroute, see where the traffic is going, and hopefully figure out what to adjust or who to talk to to fix the situation.

Making those operational troubleshooting results public may not be worthwhile.  The results themselves, being one-offs, are not something it would be all that interesting to track over time.  If anybody does want a one-off traceroute to a particular target, they can go get it themselves.  It is pretty obvious who is doing the traceroutes.  If there are a bunch of traceroutes to a certain CDN operators’ services, they almost always come from that CDN operators’ corporate network, so it does show who is concerned about network performance issues in certain regions at certain times.  That info might be potentially interesting — color for a news story about an outage saying “as the outage unfolded, engineers from company X unleashed a series of measurements to see paths into their network from region Y.”  Given the fear a lot of companies have about releasing internal information to the public, I worry that that would have a “chilling effect” on use of the service.

So, I think think Global Traceroute and Atlas are together a useful operational tool.  I think it’s made more useful by setting is_public to false in the query.  I’d really like to be able to continue proxying non-public one-off measurements into Atlas.

Thanks,
Steve

> On Dec 14, 2022, at 9:57 PM, Alexander Burke via ripe-atlas <ripe-atlas at ripe.net> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> From the linked page:
> 
>> A total of 173 users scheduled at least one, 81 users have at least two, one specific user scheduled 91.5% of all of these.
> 
> That is surprising. What do those numbers look like if you zoom out to the past 6/12/24 months?
> 
> If you can count on one hand the number of users using >90% of the private measurements over a longer timeframe than two weeks, then I submit that the choice is clear.
> 
> Cheers,
> Alex
> 
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