Summary

  • Romain Fontugne’s IHR monitor places RIS Live routing observations, BGPlay history and historical RPKI status in one view. The services answer different time questions.
  • In his April 2026 account, RPKIviews refreshed every 20 minutes. A validation colour that changes after a BGP burst cannot timestamp the cause of that burst to the minute.

A network dashboard can make two feeds look like one event. Fontugne built a useful trap detector into his own: the routing line and the validation colours sit together, but he says their transitions do not line up perfectly. The difference comes from the RPKI feed’s 20-minute update cycle in his RIPE Labs account. The pixels are adjacent; the clocks are not.

The first clock is BGP observation. The RIPE NCC RIS Live manual describes a filterable WebSocket stream of real-time JSON BGP messages. Fontugne’s monitor lets a user enter a prefix, choose RIS Live and select collectors. It plots reachability, message counts and AS paths from those observers. A burst says that selected RIS peers saw updates. The monitor makes the burst legible; it does not turn the selected peers into every path on the Internet.

The second clock is historical context. The RIPE NCC BGPlay API supplies the initial observed BGP state at a query’s start and the updates through its end, with the peers and AS nodes involved. In Fontugne’s monitor, that record lets an operator replay what the selected observers saw. Historical RPKI status adds another layer, but Fontugne identifies its lower temporal resolution. A red band beside a sharp BGP drop can be a strong clue. Its left edge is not a certified minute of causation.

That distinction changes the first response to a disappearing prefix. Read the update timestamps and the collector set; inspect the path changes; then read the validation state with its own freshness. If a route vanishes and the colour changes in a 20-minute feed, the screen alone cannot give the exact minute of the underlying ROA change. An exact ROA change record and collector-specific BGP sequence would narrow the order. A pretty overlay cannot supply missing timestamps.

Fontugne’s design puts a difficult piece of operational evidence within a browser tab. That is the achievement. Its honest limit is equally useful: a shared screen can hold different measurements without granting them a shared clock. Source records: Fontugne’s original account, RIS Live manual, BGPlay API documentation.