[atlas] Fwd: Your credits are decreasing dramatically!

Hi Lukas,

The intention of this mail is to warn you in case the system has reasons 
to believe that you'll run out of credits "soon". A burst of one-off 
measurements changes the credit consumption rate temporarily, so it kind 
of makes sense that you see correlation between when you get these mails 
and when you schedule new measurements.

However, I cannot claim the calculation behind it is flawless; based on 
your report we'll do a sanity check of what it did in your cases.

Thank you for flagging this!

Regards,
Robert


On 2024-01-11 20:55, Lukas Tribus wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 
> the "Your credits are decreasing dramatically!" emails have always
> been a mystery to me. I always get them a few days after a
> "troubleshooting session" with a number of one-off measurements.
> 
> 
> Here's the latest one; on January 6th, between 14:00 and 16:00 UTC I
> made a number of one-off Atlas measurements. The youngest (latest)
> Requested Stop Time which matches Systems Stop Time is:
> 2024-01-06T14:35:02Z
> 
> I did not request any other measurements, and I have no "continuous"
> measurements running currently.
> 
> 
> 
> And yet, on January 10th 00:48 UTC I get an warning:
> 
>> Our records show that you've consumed 40500 RIPE Atlas credits in the last 48 hours, or approximately 14.06 credits/minute.
> 
> 
> 
> On January 11th, 01:56 UTC I get the same exact warning again:
> 
>> Our records show that you've consumed 40500 RIPE Atlas credits in the last 48 hours, or approximately 14.06 credits/minute.
> 
> 
> 
> The data in those emails is just wrong, I did not use any credits for
> at least 72 hours (first email) and at least 96 hours (second email).
> 
> It looks like already stopped one-off measurements are used for
> predictions not only of the future but for the past 48 hours as well?
> 
> This is not a first, I got many of those erroneous messages in the past.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Lukas
> 
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: RIPE Atlas <no-reply at ripe.net>
> Date: Thu, 11 Jan 2024 at 02:56
> Subject: Your credits are decreasing dramatically!
> To: Lukas Tribus <lukas at ltri.eu>
> 
> 
> 
> Dear RIPE Atlas probe host,
> 
> Our records show that you've consumed 40500 RIPE Atlas credits in the
> last 48 hours, or approximately 14.06 credits/minute. We're pleased
> that you find the user-defined measurements useful and encourage you
> to keep conducting them!
> 
> However, we'd like to give you a heads up that you have 2d 16h 6m
> before you will run out of credits at this rate. We recommend you stop
> some of your current measurements before this happens. If you do run
> out of credits, we will have to automatically stop running some of
> your measurements so that you do not reach a negative balance.
> 
> If you would like to continue running a large number of user-defined
> measurements, you might want to consider applying for another probe or
> sponsoring a block of probes in order to earn more credits. Learn more
> about sponsoring probes at
> https://atlas.ripe.net/get-involved/become-a-sponsor/
> 
> Thank you for participating in RIPE Atlas!
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> RIPE Atlas Team
>