Accounts and roles

Atlas has four access levels: anonymous, then the three roles viewer, staff and admin in increasing order. Every account has exactly one role, and each role includes everything below it.

A large part of the site is public. Registration is self-serve — a username and a password is all it takes — and gives you the viewer role. staff and admin are assigned, not requested.

What each level reaches

TIP

The navigation hides what your role cannot open, so the menu you see is a subset of the one described throughout this documentation. If a link in these pages takes you back to the home page, you are below the role it needs.

Public — no account

Probe lookup and list · anchor list, detail, measurements and DNSMON · the measurement list, detail and well-known set · events · anchor, probe, connection-event and data-delay statistics · every Trends page except probe health · new-probe and probe-archive graphs · AS population trends · ASN, IP and domain lookups · RIS Live · regions, countries and cities.

That covers most of what a casual visitor wants: look up a probe, look up an ASN, see how the fleet is doing.

Viewer — any registered account

Adds the personal surfaces: your dashboard, the activity feed, issues and your feedback threads. Also unlocks UN/LOCODE lookup and routing history.

Staff

The operational half of the site. This is a bigger jump than it sounds — most of the analysis-heavy views live here:

• Health: probe health, probe result health, anchor health, missed disconnects
• Mesh: mesh health, mesh matrix, mesh topology
• Deployments: country coverage, AS population gaps, weather and outages
• Network: anycast prefixes and intel, geofeed accuracy, IXPs, peering networks, facilities
• Monitoring: targets, alerts and channels
• Observations: events
• Personal API keys at /account/api-keys

Admin

Everything under /admin — user management, worker and task control, the database view, the ingestion and enrichment admin pages, the audit log, the notification pipeline and UDM budgets. Not covered by this documentation.

Signing up and signing in

Register at /register with a username and password; you are signed in immediately. Sessions are held in a cookie, so you stay signed in across visits until you sign out.

Add an email address on your profile if you want to be able to recover the account. It is optional and empty by default, and the password-reset flow at /forgot-password has nothing to send to without it.

A note on the RIPE Atlas API key

Separate from all of the above, your profile can hold a RIPE Atlas API key. That key is not an Atlas credential and grants you nothing here — it is what the dashboard uses to read your credits, probes and measurements from RIPE on your behalf. Everything else on the site works without it.

Not to be confused with an Atlas API key, which authenticates against this platform's own API and is staff-only. See API keys.