Metrics Team

Overview

Welcome to the Metrics Team page. The Metrics Team is a group of Tor people who care about measuring and analyzing things in the public Tor network. If you're interested in measurements and analyses, the Metrics Team is what you're looking for. Welcome!

People

The Metrics Team currently consists of between half a dozen and a dozen developers, depending on how and when you count. We're not listing names here to keep the team open to everyone. You're on the team if you're participating in discussions and development, and you're not part of the team anymore if you decide you want to move on (which we hope won't happen).

Communication

Our synchronous medium of communication is IRC meetings that happen every Thursday at 1500 UTC in #tor-meeting on OFTC.

If you want to reach someone from the team between these meetings to ask a development-related question, just go to #tor-dev and mention the magic word "metrics", and somebody from the team might either be around or appear later and get back to you.

Our asynchronous medium of communication is the metrics-team@ mailing list. This list is public in the sense that anyone can subscribe and read archives. But it's moderated on first post, meaning that your first post will be reviewed to make sure it's not spam and on topic and all further posts will go directly to the list. Feel free to subscribe and just listen if you want, and feel free to post if you have a question that you think is on topic.

Products

The Metrics Team is not selling any products, don't worry.

Product is a codebase of software maintained by the Team. Not all products of the Metrics Team are mentioned in this section (for a more complete list see roadmap draft). Instead, we list some long-term products here that are or will be released in way that a third party can decide to run a mirror of this type of service.

Here some links to these products' pages (in alphabetical order):

• CollecTor the friendly data collecting service. A wiki subsection for CollecTor mirror operators mirror operating wiki.
• ExoneraTor helps to find out whether that address was used as a Tor relay.
• Metrics the primary place to learn interesting facts about the Tor network.
• metrics-lib a Java library that fetches and parses Tor descriptors.
• Onionoo is a web-based protocol to learn about currently running Tor relays and bridges. A wiki subsection for Onionoo mirror operators mirror operating wiki

Releases

[[TicketQuery(component^=Metrics,summary^=Release,status=!closed,col=id|summary|component|changetime,desc=true,order=changetime,format=table,max=7)]]

Documentation

An FAQ by and about the Metrics Team. If something you want to know is not answered yet, check back in a few days. Or address your question directly to us via the communication channels listed in the previous section.

The 32C3 State of the Onion talk covered work of the Metrics Team by giving example of how bad relays are detected, investigated, and excluded from the Tor network. The entire talk is worth watching, but if you're short on time, be sure to watch minutes 20 to 28.

More documentation

• Volunteer's Guide
• FAQs
• coding style guides

Censorship Watch

MetricsTimeline lists incidents that might help in interpreting metrics graphs.

Here's a table with tickets related to censorship incidents: [[TicketQuery(component=Circumvention/Censorship analysis,status=!closed,format=table,order=changetime,desc=true,col=id|summary|status|priority|severity|reporter|changetime,max=7)]]

ROADMAP 2020

(Old roadmaps are archived here.)

PRIORITIES 2020

• OnionPerf: Run the long-running instances, including making major code improvements for Scalability project next year.
• CollecTor service.
• Tor Metrics website: We keep most of the Tor Metrics website, including its current graphs.
• Exit scanner (TorDNSEL rewrite)
• Running and mantaining Onionoo and Exonerator and Relay Search.

TIMELINE 2020

• (January to April) Exit Scanner needs to be deployed ASAP
• (May to October) Onionperf project
• IPv6 project work with little-t tor team
• Empowering Communities in the Global South to Bypass Censorship's project - objectives 2 and 3

TicketQuery(keywords~=metrics-team-roadmap-2020,format=progress)

[[TicketQuery(keywords~=metrics-team-roadmap-2020,status=!closed,format=table,order=priority,desc=true,col=id|summary|component|status|owner|priority|severity|points|reporter,group=component)]]

ALL Open Tickets

The following table lists all open tickets, from recently modified to not touched in years, of products that are maintained by Metrics Team people or otherwise related. Not all of these products are actively maintained, so be sure to reach out to the team before starting to hack on any of these and also take a look at the Volunteer's Guide. Also note that not all metrics-related tools use Tor's Trac as their bug tracker, so you might also want to ask for bug trackers of other metrics tools.

[[TicketQuery(component^=Metrics,status=!closed,format=table,order=changetime,desc=true,col=id|summary|component|status|owner|priority|severity|time|changetime|reporter,max=20)]]