Oracle has publicly launched a new tool that makes viewing the health of the Internet in real time as easy as opening a web browser.
It’s called the Oracle Internet Intelligence Map and was designed by the Oracle Internet Intelligence team to display data that indicates widespread Internet outages, traffic changes, and emerging threat locations in real time.
Getting to the map is as easy as clicking on the link above, but once you’re there, you may wonder what kind of information you’re getting and what it might mean. There is a lot to digest, and making the map data actionable means knowing what is displayed. Here is a summary of the Oracle Internet Intelligence Map.
Country statistics
When you browse to map.internetintel.oracle.com, you are greeted with the main screen of Oracle’s Internet Intelligence Map: the Statistics tab for each country.
Here, Oracle displays live Internet interruptions based on three statistics: BGP paths, traces to responding hosts, and DNS queries from the target country to Oracle servers.
Doug Madory, Oracle’s director of Internet analytics, explains that these three statistics can help determine what kind of blackout is happening and gives the example of the Internet blackouts in Syria.
When traffic in Syria is likely to be blocked, Oracle sees a zero drop in BGP and traceroutes, but DNS queries skyrocket, indicating that traffic may be out but not in.
To drill down to a specific country, click on that country’s name on the left side of the screen or on the corresponding point on the world map. When you look at an individual country, you will see details of the traffic entering and leaving its borders.
By viewing the statistics tab for a given country, you can clearly see the traceroute, BGP and DNS search data for the last 48 hours.
When you close the full-screen statistics window and click to return to the main Country Statistics screen, you will see a second tab: Traffic Changes. Clicking on it will take you to the screen shown in the following image:
Here you can see statistics on any changes in the flow of internet traffic. “We call these traffic changes and colour them blue on the map because they are not necessarily connectivity interruptions or interruptions. These are simply good, bad or neutral changes in the way traffic is routed over the Internet,” Madory said.
Clicking on a country with a blue dot on the map will display the individual ISP data for that country.
Clicking on an ISP’s name will display detailed statistics on the changing traffic patterns for that provider as shown by the upward pairs.
All that data is available for free on Oracle’s Internet Intelligence Map, and now that you have an idea of what kind of data is presented, its value is evident. For more details on the details of the Oracle map, click on the link at the beginning of this article.