OK, I just heard about the latest Pacific earthquake and my first thought is about undersea cables and a possible circuit outage or impact on latency. Separately, on Monday, there was an ATT fiber cut near Pittsburgh, PA. Apparently hundreds of customers were impacted.
I'm sure every Orion user has experienced a carrier circuit failure and struggled to determine the root cause. With tools like Orion, customers often see an outage before the carrier knows what's going on. Until the carrier finally confirms the outage, you have to assume the outage is in your equipment -- your own network is guilty until proven innocent.
My proposal is that these Orion circuit failure observations would be reported to a centralized database... perhaps with a Google Map API. Instantly knowing that 5 other Orion users reported a common failure in the same geography would be very valuable in determining the fastest path to recovery.
This same approach is used for SPAM protection. Email gateway applianes hash incoming messages and request score info from the manufacturers central database. Frequent observations of the same hash indicate SPAM and block the message.
I'd appreciate feedback and suggestions on how this common circuit database could work.
Rob
