Ask HN: Can you help me monitor the Internet?
Below is a rough idea of what I have in mind, please comment with any idea or opinion to refine my draft. How would you do it? What kind of tech/tools do you recommend? What did I miss? Any help will be greatly appreciated ;)
Draft: - A couple of servers would run various checks and store the results in a central database, a public page would be available at internet.rip and display the status of the Internet with details on ongoing outages and their estimated impact. - Check most DNS servers (TLDs, ISPs, Public), public routers status (not sure how to do this, looking glass?), public BGP routes for instabilities or missing routes, Internet Exchanges status, route, latency and packet loss to most IPs (best would be to find the smallest set of IPv4 to monitor passing through the highest number of different routers to be able to draw a map of network paths and their status) - Keep the infrastructure simple: don't want to need a server on each AS so it would best to monitor from the outside as much as possible, otherwise this could be a different approach with an open-source deamon people can install on their servers to contribute, but that's much more complicated. - Make internet.rip (the website) as resilient to network issues as possible and for this I'm thinking CDN, multiple DNS, very long caching of the public page, service workers and multiple API endpoints to fetch the data reachable through JS directly using their IP so it could even work without any DNS if you have the site in cache. - Keep internet.rip free by limiting the cost, the infrastructure will be supported by me. Maybe add a discrete donation button but no ads.
You can also reach me at adrien@updown.io if you have anything to discuss privately. Feel free to register on the landing page to know when it launches (http://internet.rip)