[atlas] Overuse of software probes

On 31. 03. 22 20:15, Ponikierski, Grzegorz via ripe-atlas wrote:
> Software probes is great improvement for Atlas environment and it made 
> deployments so much easier and more scalable. One of my probes is also 
> software probe on Raspberry Pi. However, me and my team noticed that 
> sometimes software probes are overused and make measurements more 
> cumbersome to interpret. For example we found that there 4 software 
> probes in AWS Johannesburg [1] and 15 software probes in Hostinger Sao 
> Paulo [2]. That's total overkill. These 15 probes in Hostinger Sao Paulo 
> is 21% of all connected probes in Brazil. All of them delivers 
> practically the same results so without additional data filtering (which 
> is not easy) they can dramatically skew final results for Brazil.
> 
> With this I would like to open discussion how to handle this situation. 
> Please share your thoughts about these questions:
> 
>   * How can we standardize data filtering for such case?

I'm not sure what data filtering you have in mind, but I know for sure 
that richer _probe selection_ filters would help for my use-cases.

First, the current probe selection options I'm aware of are:

(web wizard)
- Geo name
- ASN # filter
- IP filter
- Probe # filter

(web "manual" selection)
- Type (mandatory)
- Area (mandatory)
- Number of probes (mandatory)
- Include tags
- Exclude tags

Proposal for new filters options:
- Spread selection evenly across geo locations, max. N probes location
- Spread selection evenly across ASNs, max. N probes per ASN
- Spread selection across IP subnets, max. N probes per IP subnet

I imagine that these three should work as intersection with the other 
filter (and themselves). I.e. it should allow to specify:
- location = BR
- max 2 probes per ASN
- max 1 probe per subnet

Right now I'm trying to do that by manually selecting probe IDs when I 
need to, but obviously that does not scale.

Thank you for considering this.

-- 
Petr Špaček  @  Internet Systems Consortium