atlas_tools

This repository provides a collection of command line tools for the RIPE Atlas network. In particular, the tools allow you to:

1. Create measurements.
2. Parse JSON-formatted measurement results (experimental)
3. Select Atlas probes based on their area.

Most of the tools are work-in-progress, so don't expect too much.

Creating measurements

Here's an example showing how you can fire off measurements from the command line. You will need an API key (denoted as API_KEY).

$ ./create_measurement.py -o dns -u www.example.org CA 1 API_KEY

This will create a one-off DNS measurement using the probe's resolver. The measurement will attempt to resolve www.example.org on a randomly chosen probe in Canada.

Parse JSON-formatted measurement results

Note that this tool is incomplete and experimental and you are better off using RIPE Atlas Sagan. Nevertheless, here's how you would do it:

$ ./parser.py MEASUREMENT.JSON

The tool is meant to provide line-based results which can be piped into tools such as grep.

Select Atlas probes based on their area

The distribution of Atlas probes is not uniform and several autonomous systems (AS) contain a large fraction of all Atlas probes. The tool probe_selector.py will randomly sample probes from the given 2-letter country code (or WW for world wide). The sampling is done on the AS level which means that there will be a maximum of one probe for each AS. The output is a list of probe IDs.

Here's how you can select 10 random probes in 10 distinct ASes in Italy:

$ ./probe_selector.py IT 10

Alternatives

Don't like atlas_tools? Luckily, there are a bunch of great alternatives such as RIPE Atlas Sagan for parsing results, ripe-atlas-community-contrib which provides various small tools, and RIPE Atlas Command Line Manager which provides a command line manager.

Contact

Contact: Philipp Winter phw@nymity.ch
OpenPGP fingerprint: B369 E7A2 18FE CEAD EB96 8C73 CF70 89E3 D7FD C0D0