Geographic monitoring

How a measurement acquires a location, and how wrong locations are avoided.

Two different things on a status page have locations, and they mean different things.

Where the measurement was taken from

This is the worker's own location, declared at enrolment and recorded with every result it uploads. It is what makes the regional breakdown possible: "reachable from Germany" is a claim about a path that starts in Germany.

It is self-declared, which is a real limitation and worth being honest about. A worker filed under the wrong region makes a provider's regional breakdown wrong, which is why region changes go through the fleet register rather than a config file, and why a machine that moves should be retired and re-enrolled rather than edited.

Where the address being measured is

This comes from GeoIP data applied to the provider's announced prefixes, and it says where the provider's address space is presented as being. It drives the "countries measured" figure and the per-country breakdown of the footprint.

GeoIP is approximate and sometimes wrong, particularly for freshly allocated or recently transferred space. That is why a country's presence in the breakdown is reported as what it is: a statement about address space, not about datacentres.

Address space with no location

Some prefixes cannot be placed. They appear in the totals, because they are real measured space, and they are explicitly not counted as a country, because they are not one. A block holding sixty per cent of a provider's addresses with no location must not read as a country holding sixty per cent of its traffic.

Why both halves matter

Either one alone is misleading. Measurements taken only from Europe against address space announced worldwide tell you about European reachability of a global network. Measurements from everywhere against a provider announcing space in one country tell you about that country from many angles. The status page reports both so the reader can tell which situation they are looking at.

What is deliberately not claimed

Nothing here says where a provider's servers are. Address geolocation is not datacentre location, announced space is not deployed hardware, and a provider's own datacentre list is a separate thing it tells us and is labelled as such on the listing.