[tor-relays] Providing metrics relevant to relay operators

[Georg Koppen]

Hello!

I got recently pinged by a large exit operator asking whether we had a 
website with nice graphs and statistics relevant to relay operators on 
our project infrastructure (showing e.g. the largest exit operators 
etc.), but that's currently not the case and we should fix that. There 
are some third-party tools, like OrNetStats[1], but we think it would be 
very useful for our relay operators to have relevant information 
available on the Tor Project website itself. Those third-party projects 
are a good contribution to the overall ecosystem we have but might e.g. 
die at some point due to lack of maintenance or move their focus to 
particular parts of the network while neglecting others, which is fine 
in general. However, we as a project should make sure our relay 
operators and we ourselves are not losing important insights into the 
state of the network and its different relay groups in case anything 
like that happens.

At the end of the day those statistics and graphs should show up on 
metrics.torproject.org but we are not there yet given the complex nature 
of that website and our plans to fix that. However, thanks to our 
efforts of setting up a database containing all the relay descriptors 
and other network documents and our ongoing Google Summer of Code 
project for making those accessible with the help of a network status 
API we can start to experiment with providing those statistics early on 
via a different venue. I've just filed a ticket tracking that process[2] 
for those of you who are interested.

As always we are very much interested in collaboration and getting 
feedback from all of you. So, if you have particular statistics and 
graphs you would like to see on such a website, please speak up! 
Ideally, this would happen on the above-mentioned Gitlab issue but just 
replying to this thread or in private is fine as well.

Thanks,
Georg

[1] https://nusenu.github.io/OrNetStats/
[2] 
https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/network-health/metrics/website/-/issues/40091
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OpenPGP_signature
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-relays/attachments/20230607/a0548f2c/attachment.sig>