Hi,
Obviously, measurements are the purpose of being of the RIPE Atlas
system. Thus, e.g., I take greate care to maximize probe uptime so
measurements scheduled on them don't get disrupted by local events that
are likely not representative of what most measurements are looking at.
However, sometimes, temporary disruption may be known to come up, but is
unavoidable, e.g., for maintenance of, or around the probe. Or a probe
needs to be taken out of service "for good".
In those cases, it is obviously hardly possible to avoid long-running
measurements from being impacted, either by a short-term disruption, or
by the removal of a probe altogether. And measurement owners obviously
are aware of that, and need to take that into account in a way specific
to each measurement's purpose. And it is obviously possible to remove,
e.g., defunct probes from a running measurement and replace them with
new ones.
However, when a probe host knows _ahead of time_ that their probe will
experience some event potentially disrupting measurements (like during
planned maintenance activities), or will have to be decommissioned at a
specific time in the future, how about if they could signal that
condition to the Atlas infrastructure, and the infrastructure would at
least not schedule _new_ measurements on such probes?
E.g., by having a new probe "status" that can be explicitly set by the
probe host to say, "this probe shall (perhaps just temporarily) not get
any _new_ UDMs scheduled at this time (while the status is set)".
Just a thought, not sure how much effort that would be to implement, and
whether that would be worth the benefit of disrupting "fewer"
measurements in case of foreseeable issues with a probe (or anchor),
especially also upon an upcoming need to decommission one entirely.
Thanks!
Kind regards,
R.
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