Daniel Czerwonk

Using RIPE Atlas Measurement Results in Prometheus

Daniel Czerwonk

9 min read

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In this article I describe how I am using the atlas_exporter to export metrics based on RIPE Atlas results to Prometheus.


Introduction and Goals

I'm a big fan of Prometheus and time-series-based monitoring in general. While attending RIPE 74, I came up with the idea to use RIPE Atlas measurement results to improve my blackbox monitoring. The main goal was to monitor trends regarding latency, packet loss and hop counts. For example this gives me the opportunity to see impacts of changes after doing some traffic engineering. It's also helpful to see how latency changes over time and detect loss to avoid performance issues.

Since there was not an out-of-the-box solution for exporting measurement results to Prometheus, I decided to implement an exporter for the RIPE Atlas API in Go. Fortunately the Go bindings for the API were already made available by DNS-OARC which saved a lot of time.
 

What is atlas_exporter?

The atlas_exporter retrieves measurement results from the RIPE Atlas API and maps them to metrics. Prometheus can scrape these metrics periodically from the HTTP endpoint provided by the application. Numeric elements in Atlas measurement results are mapped to metrics. Other key attributes become labels. As of today atlas_exporter supports almost all measurement types of RIPE Atlas. Only wifi is not supported yet, because there were no obvious choices for metrics. Currently only the last measurement result is retrieved. For future releases a time span based solution is already planned.  

In my ASes I use Atlas metrics to monitor latency, packet loss and hop counts over time. An alerting based on these metrics is planned too. For example if a defined percentage of probes in a big eyeball AS can not reach my AS any more I want to be paged.

In the image below you can see a visualisation of ping and traceroute measurements in Grafana. In detail it shows the trend over one hour of latency and hop counts from 50 random probes targeting a router in one of my ASes. If there are more than one probe in the same AS the metrics of these probes are averaged.

  

Hopefully this project is useful for other people in our community too. Feedback will be much appreciated.

Below you can find the pointer to the source code for the atlas_exporter and some documentation on how to use the tool, including some example cases.

 

Source code and contribution

The source code for atlas_exporter is available on Github. I'm open for feature suggestions and pull requests. Please feel free to contribute.

 

AS-lookup and caching

Measurement data provided by the API does not contain AS information. For me it was important to get this information in a time efficient way. Based on the ID of the probe, atlas_exporter retrieves the AS number in a separate call per measurement result. These calls are performed in parallel. Of course it doesn't make sense to get this information during every scrape, so they are cached in memory for a defined time. There are two flags to configure the cache timers which can be set as start parameters.

Parameter Description Default
--cache.ttl Time before a probe lookup result expires and is removed from cache 1 hour
--cache.cleanup Interval for cleaning up expired cache lookup results 5 minutes

 

Filtering of invalid results

By default atlas_exporter ignores invalid measurement results. For example if the measurement shows IPv6 and a probe in the resultset is not compatible with IPv6, this probe is filtered out. This behavior can be changed by setting the filter.invalid-results flag to false when starting the program.

Running

From source code

Installation by go get requires Go Version 1.8:

go get -u github.com/czerwonk/atlas_exporter

After installation the atlas_exporter binary can be started from your GOPATH-bin directory

 

Using Docker

There is also a docker version available:

docker run -d -p 9400:9400 czerwonk/atlas_exporter

 

How to use the data

After starting atlas_exporter listens for connections on port 9400 by default. We can now scrape results from RIPE Atlas by using for example curl.

For measurement with id 8809582

curl http://[::1]:4200/metrics?measurement_id=8809582

the result will look similar to this one:

# HELP atlas_ping_avg_latency Average latency
# TYPE atlas_ping_avg_latency gauge
atlas_ping_avg_latency{asn="3320",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29337"} 69.51094
# HELP atlas_ping_dup Number of duplicate icmp repsponses
# TYPE atlas_ping_dup gauge
atlas_ping_dup{asn="13030",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29568"} 0
atlas_ping_dup{asn="3320",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29337"} 0
# HELP atlas_ping_max_latency Maximum latency
# TYPE atlas_ping_max_latency gauge
atlas_ping_max_latency{asn="3320",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29337"} 128.10728
# HELP atlas_ping_min_latency Minimum latency
# TYPE atlas_ping_min_latency gauge
atlas_ping_min_latency{asn="3320",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29337"} 39.557315
# HELP atlas_ping_received Number of received icmp repsponses
# TYPE atlas_ping_received gauge
atlas_ping_received{asn="13030",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29568"} 0
atlas_ping_received{asn="3320",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29337"} 3
# HELP atlas_ping_sent Number of sent icmp requests
# TYPE atlas_ping_sent gauge
atlas_ping_sent{asn="13030",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29568"} 0
atlas_ping_sent{asn="3320",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29337"} 3
# HELP atlas_ping_size Size of ICMP packet
# TYPE atlas_ping_size gauge
atlas_ping_size{asn="13030",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29568"} 0
atlas_ping_size{asn="3320",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29337"} 48
# HELP atlas_ping_success Destination was reachable
# TYPE atlas_ping_success gauge
atlas_ping_success{asn="13030",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29568"} 0
atlas_ping_success{asn="3320",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29337"} 1
# HELP atlas_ping_ttl Time-to-live field in the response
# TYPE atlas_ping_ttl gauge
atlas_ping_ttl{asn="13030",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29568"} 0
atlas_ping_ttl{asn="3320",dst_addr="2001:678:1e0::1",dst_name="bb1.ix.dus.routing.rocks",ip_version="6",measurement="8809582",probe="29337"} 57

 

Scraping configuration for Prometheus

In this example the exporter is reachable at atlas-exporter.mytld and listening for HTTP connections on port 9400. I want to scrape the current result of the example measurement every 5 minutes. 

  - job_name: 'atlas_exporter'
    scrape_interval: 5m
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - 8809582
    relabel_configs:
      - source_labels: [__address__]
        regex: (.*)(:80)?
        target_label: __param_measurement_id
        replacement: ${1}
      - source_labels: [__param_measurement_id]
        regex: (.*)
        target_label: instance
        replacement: ${1}
      - source_labels: []
        regex: .*
        target_label: __address__
        replacement: atlas-exporter.mytld:9400

 

Metrics and labels by measurement type

This is a list of all metrics currently supported in version 0.5 of atlas_exporter

ping

Name Description
atlas_ping_success Returns 1 if the probe was able to reach the target otherwise 0
atlas_ping_min_latency Minimum latency of all ECHO requests in ms
atlas_ping_max_latency Maximum latency of all ECHO requests in ms
atlas_ping_avg_latency Average latency of all ECHO requests in ms
atlas_ping_sent Number of packets sent
atlas_ping_received Number of packets received
atlas_ping_dup Number of duplicate packets received
atlas_ping_ttl Time-to-live field in the response
atlas_ping_size Size of the ICMP packet in bytes

 

traceroute

Name Description
atlas_traceroute_success Returns 1 if the probe was able to reach the target otherwise 0
atlas_traceroute_hops Number of hops
atlas_traceroute_rtt Round trip time in ms

 

DNS

Name Description
atlas_dns_success Returns 1 if the probe was able to reach the target otherwise 0
atlas_dns_rtt Round trip time in ms

 

NTP

Name Description
atlas_ntp_poll Poll interval in seconds
atlas_ntp_precision Precision of the server's clock in seconds
atlas_ntp_root_delay Round trip delay in seconds
atlas_ntp_root_dispersion Total dispersion in seconds
atlas_ntp_ntp_version NTP version

 

HTTP

Name Description
atlas_http_success Returns 1 if the probe was able to reach the target otherwise 0
atlas_http_result HTTP return code
atlas_http_version HTTP version
atlas_http_body_size Body size in bytes
atlas_http_header_size Header size in bytes
atlas_http_rtt Round trip time in ms
atlas_http_dns_error Returns 1 if DNS resolving failed

 

SSLcert

Name Description
atlas_sslcert_success Returns 1 if the probe was able to reach the target otherwise 0
atlas_sslcert_version SSL/TLS version
atlas_sslcert_rtt Round trip time in ms
atlas_sslcert_alert_level Status of the SSL/TLS certificate (0 = valid)
atlas_sslcert_alert_description Description for the alert level (see RIPIE Atlas documentation)
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About the author

Daniel Czerwonk Based in Essen, Germany

Daniel is Head of Infrastructure Engineering and Operations at Mauve Mailorder Software GmbH & Co. KG (AS48821) in Essen, Germany. Coming from an software engineering background building business applications for a decade, he got involved in the network community in 2015. Since then Daniel focused on building and running infrastructure and implementing tools for monitoring and automation. In his spare time he is an active member of the Freifunk community in Essen (running AS206356 - Freifunk Essen e.V.) and develops open source software (https://github.com/czerwonk). In this capacity he joined the BIO routing core developer team in the beginning of 2018 to implement a new routing daemon in golang. Also Daniel runs an own non-commercial IPv6 only AS named routing-rocks (AS202739).

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