The network operator community launched MANRS in 2014, with the Internet Society serving as the initiative’s secretariat and stewarding its growth for a decade. As the community expanded, the Internet Society introduced the MANRS Observatory in 2019 to help participants measure routing security performance and track compliance with MANRS actions.
In January 2024, the Global Cyber Alliance assumed responsibility for MANRS and its supporting infrastructure. Since then, GCA’s engineering team has undertaken a complete rebuild of the MANRS Observatory, creating a more resilient platform with a new data ingestion pipeline, modern API, and updated frontend. While the initial release may look familiar, the technology underneath has been entirely reengineered. Here’s what changed.
Everything is Faster
The new Observatory is near-instant on almost every page. Most API routes return within 100ms before caching. If you used the old Observatory, you’ll notice the difference immediately.
Six Years of Historical Data
The old Observatory only displayed up to two years of routing data. All of our data is now accessible (dating back to January 1, 2020), giving a much clearer picture of how routing security adoption has changed over time.
A Redesigned API
The old API could be cumbersome to use. One MANRS participant was making 2.2 million requests a month simply because there was no better way to get the data they needed. That same workflow now takes a few hundred requests. Other participants will similarly find it much easier to get the data they need, in a much simpler way.
We’re also shipping official Go and Python SDKs and a first-party CLI covering the full API. The community has built partial CLI tools over the years, but a complete, maintained, official version makes more sense. Instead of manually constructing API requests, handling authentication, parsing responses, and maintaining custom integrations, developers can use supported tools that simplify those tasks. This reduces development time, lowers the chance of errors, and makes it easier for organizations to integrate Observatory data into their own workflows, dashboards, monitoring systems, and automation tools.
More Reliable Data
When an upstream data source experienced an outage, all of the Observatory’s metrics went down with it and the GCA engineering team often wouldn’t find out until a user reported it to us. We’ve redesigned the ingestion pipeline to pull from redundant authoritative sources wherever possible, so a single outage no longer takes down entire metrics. We’ve also fixed some long-standing gaps where certain regional data wasn’t making it through at all.
Going forward, if something breaks, we’ll know about it before you do.
What’s Next
This is just the start. The rebuild opens up functionality we’ve wanted to ship for years but couldn’t, and we’ll be covering all of it in a series of upcoming blog posts.
If you’re migrating from the old Observatory or integrating against the new API, we’ve put together a full migration guide at https://docs.manrs.org/docs/api-migration/.
The Observatory is live at https://observatory.manrs.org/.
Existing credentials and API keys carry over. API docs are at https://docs.manrs.org/.
Feedback Welcome
We’re excited to open this next chapter for the MANRS Observatory and invite you to explore the new platform. While the foundation has been completely rebuilt for greater resilience and future growth, MANRS is always a community-driven effort, and your feedback matters.
If you notice any issues, inconsistencies, or areas that could be improved, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Your input helps us continue making the Observatory a more reliable and useful tool for the entire routing security community.
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