[Dnsmon-test] DNSMON testing update

Chris Amin camin at ripe.net
Mon Mar 3 16:30:34 CET 2014 

Dear testers,

During the past few weeks we have made plenty of progress and gotten a 
lot of feedback. In particular, we would like to announce the following 
features and decisions:

* Retries

What we heard was that some people were strongly opposed to having 
retries, and that everybody could agree that we definitely shouldn't use 
retries *and* hide whether they were used. Consequently, we will be 
disabling retries for all DNSMON measurements as of tomorrow.
If we find that the system is overly sensitive to certain measurement 
failures, then we will address that separately.

* Per-probe view

There was a need to get an idea of how a particular probe was seeing the 
wider DNS, so that operators could see whether an event was  something 
to do with their servers or something to do with the probe. Accordingly, 
we have created a page which displays, for a single vantage point, the 
latest 10 measurement results for every server monitored as part of DNSMON.

This view can be reached in two ways:

1. By visiting https://atlas.ripe.net/dnsmon/probes (also present in the 
navigation menu as "Probes"), which lists all RIPE Atlas Anchors used 
for DNSMON measurements. Each row links to a per-probe view.
2. By clicking on a probe label in the main DNSMON visualisation.

Example use case: you can see broken IPv4 connectivity from a probe to a 
server, and want to know whether it is a problem with the server or the 
probe.

https://atlas.ripe.net/dnsmon/group/3.4.e164.arpa.?dnsmon.server=193.171.255.10&dnsmon.zone=3.4.e164.arpa.&dnsmon.type=probes&dnsmon.startTime=1393810814&dnsmon.endTime=1393852795&dnsmon.selectedRows=&dnsmon.session.show-filter=pls&dnsmon.session.color_range_pls=0-12-12-62-100&dnsmon.session.exclude-errors=true

By clicking on the label for the relevant probe (in this case 
uk-cdf-as48294), you will be taken to 
https://atlas.ripe.net/dnsmon/probes/6028?zone=3.4.e164.arpa. where you 
can see that this probe is indeed a (still!) rare case of broken IPv4 
and working IPv6.

* Making it easier to see the details of a measurement result

For the time aggregations, it is now possible to download results for 
every measurement type (not just the visualised SOA + traceroute) for a 
particular time aggregation by clicking on a cell and then choosing a 
download link.

For the "native" time resolution, we now provide details on the 
individual DNS response within the onclick popup itself. For requests 
with an answer, this means displaying a DNS-operator-readable string 
(e.g. the SOA record). For requests without an answer, it means 
displaying the error condition which was encountered.

* Other stuff

As usual, we have been working on various other fixes and enhancements, 
some of which are listed on the testers page:

https://atlas.ripe.net/dnsmon/testing

The tool itself is still available at the usual URL:

https://atlas.ripe.net/dnsmon/index-page

Regards,
Chris


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