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What is Atlas?
Atlas is an analytics front end for the RIPE Atlas measurement network. RIPE Atlas gives you thousands of small hardware probes and anchors scattered across the internet, and an API to run measurements from them. Atlas takes that raw material — probe metadata, anchor deployments, measurement results, connection events — enriches it with routing, geolocation and peering data, and turns it into pages you can read: who is deployed where, what changed, what is broken, and how much to trust any given number.
What Atlas adds
RIPE Atlas already has a web interface. Atlas exists for the questions that one doesn't answer well:
History. RIPE's API mostly tells you about now. Atlas archives probe state, connection events and measurement metadata continuously, so you can ask what a probe's ASN was last year, when a country lost its last connected probe, or how the fleet has grown.
Cross-referencing. A probe record on its own is a location and an ASN. Atlas joins it against PeeringDB, GeoNames, published geofeeds, live BGP from RIS and its own anycast detection, so one lookup answers the network question and the geography question at once.
Aggregation. Coverage by country, probe population against AS size, mesh latency between anchors, connection-event rates — the fleet-level views that require reading every probe rather than one.
Honesty about freshness. Because most of this is archived rather than live, Atlas tracks its own ingestion lag and shows it. See Data delay.
What Atlas is not
It is a read surface. Atlas does not schedule measurements, and it will not spend your credits. The one exception is the personal dashboard, which talks to RIPE on your behalf using an API key you supply, and can stop a measurement you own.
It is also not a replacement for RIPE Atlas documentation. Where RIPE explains something well, these pages link out rather than paraphrase.
Finding your way around
The left-hand navigation groups views by subject, and this documentation mirrors it one-to-one:
| In the app | Documentation | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Probes | Probes | What do I know about this probe? |
| Anchors | Anchors | What is the anchor fleet doing? |
| Deployments | Deployments | Where is the network too thin? |
| Measurements | Measurements | What is being measured, and by whom? |
| Graphs | Graphs | What does deployment look like geographically? |
| Network | Network | What is this ASN, IP, prefix or domain? |
| Monitoring | Monitoring | Tell me when something changes |
| Locations | Locations | How does Atlas name places? |
| Statistics | Statistics | How many, right now? |
| Trends | Trends | How has that moved? |
| Issues | Issues | This data is wrong — who do I tell? |
The menu you see is smaller than the one above: entries you don't have access to are hidden. See Accounts and roles.
Next steps
- New to RIPE Atlas itself? Start with RIPE Atlas in five minutes.
- Want to know what needs an account? See Accounts and roles.
- Every chart on the site follows the same rules: Reading the charts.
- Looking for the HTTP API? See the API reference.