Spatineo monitors a large amount of web services, and most of these services are publicly available over the internet. Monitoring works in a completely automated fashion in typical cases. In some cases though, our customers are interested in identifying which requests originate from our monitoring. For example some services may require authorization using HTTP authentication, User-Agent filtering or IP address white lists.
HTTP authentication
HTTP Basic Authentication is widely used in OGC as well as with other web service protocols. As the name says, it is very basic and it is not ideal or the most secure authentication method available, but it is supported by almost all HTTP clients and servers and, despite the valid criticism, it still has its uses. If you combine Basic Authentication with a properly secured HTTPS transport, it is still a relatively good authentication method. Even without HTTPS, it does give the service provider more control over their service for example, to block offenders if irregularities arise.
Users of Spatineo Monitor may set up the basic authentication parameters used when we send requests to their service via service parameter configuration. These parameters are used for retrieving service descriptions, monitoring requests and performance tests.
In addition to HTTP Basic Authentication, our customers can configure extra query parameters or HTTP request headers that will be sent on every request.
User Agent
All monitoring requests use the HTTP User-Agent request header to tell the server that the request is coming from Spatineo. This is the most precise way of knowing which requests are sent by us. For monitoring requests, the User Agent also contains a link to the Spatineo Directory page of the monitored service. Please keep in mind however that the User-Agent identifiers we use are well known and as such, are unreliable for authentication.
The User-Agent for querying for new services or updating previously known services is:
Spatineo Monitor Controller (http://www.spatineo.com/spatineo-monitor/)
The following User-Agent is used for monitoring requests (where NNN is the ID for this particular service):
Spatineo Monitor GetMapBot (http://www.spatineo.com/spatineo-monitor; MonitoredService http://directory.spatineo.com/service/NNN)
Spatineo Performance uses this User-Agent for requests sent during performance tests:
Spatineo Performance (http://www.spatineo.com/spatineo-performance/)
User-Agent information is also helpful if you wish to allow or block monitoring from us by using the robots.txt mechanism.
Source IP
The Spatineo monitoring network is comprised of multiple servers running in multiple data centers. Monitoring requests, performance tests and service discovery all come from different IP addresses. We keep an up to date list of the IP addresses used by monitoring and service discovery which is available at http://directory.spatineo.com/public/monitoring-ip-list.txt. The list is automatically updated when IP addresses are added or removed from the list.
Please keep in mind that this list does not include the IP addresses that Spatineo Performance tests originate from.
