[atlas] Overuse of software probes

Hello all!

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?
  *   How to proactively and automatically detect overuse of probes?
  *   How can we encourage software probes hosts to avoid deployments in data centers which are already covered by Atlas?
  *   How to give incentives to deploy probes in data centers without existing probes?

[1] 4 software probes inside AWS Johannesburg:
1000707<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1000707/>
1001397<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1001397/>
1002066<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1002066/>
1002632<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1002632/>

[2] 15 software probes inside Hostinger Sao Paulo
1003554<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003554/>

1003555<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003555/>

1003556<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003556/>

1003557<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003557/>

1003558<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003558/>

1003559<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003559/>

1003560<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003560/>

1003561<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003561/>

1003562<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003562/>

1003563<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003563/>

1003564<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003564/>

1003565<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003565/>

1003566<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003566/>

1003567<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003567/>

1003568<https://atlas.ripe.net/frames/probes/1003568/>


Regards,
Grzegorz Ponikierski
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