Accessing Traceroute Data and Format Change RFC Results

Two recent disucssions on Traceroute on our M-Lab Discuss group provided clarity on how to access Traceroute data in BigQuery, as well as solicited feedback from the community on proposed changes to the traceroute output format.

Accessing Traceroute Data

Up until early September 2021, MDA traceroutes were archived in Google Cloud Storage (GCS) as traceroute datatype. Since then, they are archived as scamper1 datatype without any changes to the content.

You can visit the links below to access traceroute archives obtained by the host, ndt, and neubot experiments (replace $experiment accordingly).

  • Before 2021-09-11: https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/archive-measurement-lab/$experiment/traceroute
  • After 2021-09-11: https://console.cloud.google.com/storage/browser/archive-measurement-lab/$experiment/scamper1

We will soon update the Traceroute page on M-Lab’s website to cover the name change and also provide links to scamper1 datatype.

Traceroute Format Change RFC Results

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback to our Traceroute RFC. We are glad that the community is finding M-Lab’s traceroute data useful and is actively using it.

Based on the feedback we have received, we will continue to collect MDA traceroutes as before and archive them as scamper1 datatype.

We are eager to hear from you how you use traceroute data. In particular, we appreciate you letting us know:

  • Do you use the traceroute archives in GCS or do you query traceroute data in BigQuery?
  • What tools do you use to analyze traceroute data?
  • What dashboards, reports, citations, etc. have you created?

Your answers will help us further improve our traceroute collection and archival processes.

Our team is organizing a meeting to discuss these topics and how to best implement them to suit the needs of our community. If you would like to also be included in this discussion re: MDA traceroutes, have recommendations for others to include, or have feedback about the use of our traceroute data more broadly – please reply on the appropriate discussion thread listed below, or email laiyi@measurementlab.net

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