We actually have app-based data collection capabilities and initiatives. Our goal, or more appropriately, vision, is to map the internet in real time. This involves SSH access to devices to run different forms of measurements at a very high frequency and have control over those devices.

Managing 70k probes is not going to be super hard.

Managing 1,400 servers is just a normal business operation, not a technical challenge. Each probe has a standard OS-level configuration. Automation and configuration are deployed from a central system. Each probe is actively monitored and troubleshot. Data is dumped to a data warehouse. We make incremental improvements to our network. When servers go down, we talk to vendors.

We do a lot of novel engineering things from the infrastructure, data, and research team. Having a very identical set of servers really allows us to focus on product and performance engineering, not troubleshooting engineering. With application-based probing, I assume it will complicate things quite a bit, as there are different operating systems, different devices, etc.

For us, lately the challenge is not technical. It has been exclusively procurement. This quarter (https://ipinfo.io/blog/probenet-q1-2026-expansion), we exclusively focused on regional diversity which involved outreach to national ISPs or telecoms. Securing servers from telecoms is an extremely bureaucratic and expensive process. So, we are hoping to partner up with eyeball networks and the larger NOG community.