Creating Measurements

Measurement creation is managed on the premise of needing to submit as little information as possible while still obtaining something useful. With that said, even the simplest measurement requires a rather large amount of information to initiate things. You will need to compose a measurement definition that has at least the type, af, description and target fields, as well as a probes object telling us which probes you want to use for the measurement.

If you omit the start_time, we assume you want it to start right away; if you don't set the is_oneoff flag, we assume it must be a regular measurement, and so on.

You will also have to use a valid key with the right permissions. See the section on keys for more information.

This section of the manual doesn't contain a try-it-out box, because it would create real measurements on the RIPE Atlas system and place unnecessary burden on the network. In addition, you would need a valid key.

If you do want to create measurements, you must use a tool that is able to send POST requests with a payload to RIPE Atlas. Three such tools are postman (a plug-in for Chrome), HttpRequester (a plugin for Firefox) and cURL (a command-line tool).

Structure

Our measurement REST API uses a JSON payload with a POST verb to create new measurements.

You can fill in one or more measurement definitions, one or more probes objects, and some fields that are applicable to all measurements you want to create.

The Response

The response to any successful POST request will return an object that has one field called measurements. This field holds an array that contains the IDs of the created measurements. The array reflects the order in which they were specified in the definitions list of your request.