Organisations often wonder why does Spatineo monitor their spatial web services? They might have noticed that we are sending requests to their services. Currently we monitor almost 70 000 open services globally, and the data we gather from these services is for the benefit of all, both for the owners and users of services. We don’t keep the data for ourselves, but share it to the community.
Spatineo Monitoring Agent
We have been monitoring open spatial web services since 2012, and we have gathered a huge amount of useful data for everyone to use. Our open data of the availability of services is freely usable to recognize your success and promote the impact of your open spatial data.
Spatineo monitors services continuously around the clock from our network of dedicated monitoring servers we call agents. Each of the monitored Spatial Web Services is sent a lightweight test request every 5 minutes. This interval is frequent enough to get a reliable measurement of availability as well as timely alarms for our customers, but not cause extra load to the monitored servers. This interval also complies with the performance testing criteria set in the INSPIRE technical guidance. But what are the technical details behind this all?
How are the requests established?
Spatineo formulates requests to services based on the service description (for example the OGC Capabilities document) and the specification or API. The requests target a dataset that is available in the service using a bounding box within the bounds of that dataset. The bounds are varied using artificial intelligence as per our patented technology. You can read more on our Monitoring agents network and the technical nature of it here.
Impact of Open Data – Reason for Monitoring
As more and more open services are released to the public, we have been able to perform wider and more comprehensive analysis of the whole spatial data community. Comparing services to each other enables us to find and study services that are doing extraordinary well. We want to be a top of knowledge here, and be able to give our customers the best advice and guidance in reaching new heights of success.
As we want to be as transparent as possible with our data collection, we publish all this data in our Spatineo Directory. There you can find all the info we have harnessed from monitored services. If you want to improve your service page, you can check our service metadata guide, for tips and tricks. There we have written a guide on how to improve the information content of the service metadata of your services.
So why is monitoring beneficial for you also?
When trying to improve your services, you need to know some metrics on how the services are doing right now. Availability is one of those key performance indicators that you need to know when planning the development. Spatineo provides to you that information via Spatineo Directory. Displaying your success to your stakeholders and users of services is really beneficial.
In-case we haven’t discovered your services yet, we made a youtube video on how to manually add your spatial web services to Spatineo Directory. You can see the video here:
If you have any questions related to our monitoring, feel free to contact us for additional information by email or our contact form!
