Use & Examples¶

Important Note¶

The one thing that tends to confuse people when first trying out Sagan is that this library operates on single measurement results, and not a list of results. If you have a list of results (for example, the output of the measurement results API), then you must loop over those results and pass each result to Sagan for parsing.

Basics¶

To that end, the interface is pretty simple. If you have a ping measurement result, then use the PingResult class to make use of the data:

from ripe.atlas.sagan import PingResult

my_result = PingResult('this is where your big JSON blob goes')

my_result.af
# Returns 6

my_result.rtt_median
# Returns 123.456

Note that rtt_median isn’t actually in the JSON data passed in. It’s calculated during the parsing phase so you don’t need to fiddle with looping over attributes in a list and doing the math yourself.

Plain Text Not Required¶

It should be noted that while all of the examples here use a plain text string for our results, Sagan doesn’t force you to pass in a string. It’s just as happy with a Python dict, the result of already running your result string through json.loads():

import json
from ripe.atlas.sagan import PingResult

my_result_dict = json.loads('this is where your big JSON blob goes')
my_result = PingResult(my_result_dict)

my_result.af
# Returns 6

my_result.rtt_median
# Returns 123.456

Agnostic Parsing¶

There may be a case where you have code that’s just expected to parse a result string, without knowing ahead of time what type of result it is. For this we make use of the parent Result class’ get() method:

from ripe.atlas.sagan import Result

my_result = Result.get('this is where your big JSON blob goes')

my_result.af
# Returns 6

my_result.rtt_median
# Returns 123.456

As you can see it works just like PingResult, but doesn’t force you to know its type up front. Note that this does incur a small performance penalty however.

Errors & Malformations¶

RIPE Atlas, like the Internet is never 100% what you’d expect. Sometimes your measurement will return an error such as a timout or DNS lookup problem, and sometimes the data in a result might even be malformed on account of data corruption, damaged probe storage, etc.

And like the most applications on the Internet, Sagan attemps to handle these inconsistencies gracefully. You can decide just how gracefully however.

Say for example you’ve got a result that looks alright, but the abuf value is damaged in some way rendering it unreadable. You’ll find that while the DnsResult object will not have a is_malformed=False, the portion that is unreadable will be set to True:

from ripe.atlas.sagan import DnsResult
my_result = DnsResult('your JSON blob')

my_result.is_error                        # False
my_result.is_malformed                    # False
my_result.responses[0].abuf.is_malformed  # True
my_result.responses[1].abuf.is_malformed  # False

You can control what you’d like Sagan to do in these cases by setting on_malformation= when parsing:

from ripe.atlas.sagan import DnsResult

# Sets is_malformed=True and issues a warning
my_result = DnsResult('your JSON blob')

# Sets is_malformed=True
my_result = DnsResult('your JSON blob', on_malformation=DnsResult.ACTION_IGNORE)

# Sets explodes with a ResultParseError
my_result = DnsResult('your JSON blob', on_malformation=DnsResult.ACTION_FAIL)

Similarly, you can do the same thing with on_error=, which perform the same way when Sagan encounters an error like a timeout or DNS lookup problem.

Error handling is not yet complete in Sagan, so if you run across a case where it behaves in a way other than what you’d expect, please send a copy of the problematic result to atlas@ripe.net and we’ll use it to update this library.

Parsing Results out of a Local File¶

Assume for a moment that you’ve downloaded a bunch of results into a local file using our fragmented JSON format. That is, you have in your possession a file that has a separate JSON result on every line. For the purposes of our example we’ll call it file.txt.:

from ripe.atlas.sagan import Result

my_results_file = "/path/to/file.txt"
with open(my_results_file) as results:
    for result in results.readlines():
        parsed_result = Result.get(result)
        print(parsed_result.origin)

Basically you use Python to open the file (using with) and then loop over each line in the file (.readlines()), sending each line into Sagan which returns a parsed_result. With that result, you can then pull out any of the values you like, using the Attributes & Methods documentation as a reference.

Pulling Directly from the API¶

A common use case for the parser is to plug it into our RESTful API service. The process for this is pretty simple: fetch a bunch of results, loop over them, and for each one, apply the parser to get the value you want.

Say for example you want to get the checksum value for each result from measurement #1012449. To do this, we’ll fetch the latest results from each probe via the measurement-latest API, and parse each one to get the checksum values:

import requests
from ripe.atlas.sagan import SslResult

source = "https://atlas.ripe.net/api/v1/measurement-latest/1012449/"
response = requests.get(source).json

for probe_id, result in response.items():

    result = result[0]                 # There's only one result for each probe
    parsed_result = SslResult(result)  # Parsing magic!

    # Each SslResult has n certificates
    for certificate in parsed_result.certificates:
        print(certificate.checksum)  # Print the checksum for this certificate

    # Make use of the handy get_checksum_chain() to render the checksum of each certificate into one string if you want
    print(parsed_result.get_checksum_chain())

Samples from Each Type¶

ping_result.packets_sent  # Int
ping_result.rtt_median    # Float, rounded to 3 decimal places
ping_result.rtt_average   # Float, rounded to 3 decimal places

traceroute_result.af                   # 4 or 6
traceroute_result.total_hops           # Int
traceroute_result.destination_address  # An IP address string

dns_result.responses                        # A list of Response objects
dns_result.responses[0].response_time       # Float, rounded to 3 decimal places
dns_result.responses[0].headers             # A list of Header objects
dns_result.responses[0].headers[0].nscount  # The NSCOUNT value for the first header
dns_result.responses[0].questions           # A list of Question objects
dns_result.responses[0].questions[0].type   # The TYPE value for the first question
dns_result.responses[0].abuf                # The raw, unparsed abuf string

ssl_result.af                        # 4 or 6
ssl_result.certificates              # A list of Certificate objects
ssl_result.certificates[0].checksum  # The checksum for the first certificate

http_result.af                      # 4 or 6
http_result.uri                     # A URL string
http_result.responses               # A list of Response objects
http_result.responses[0].body_size  # The size of the body of the first response