We use services to monitor the uptime of the server we use for our research data repository. In addition, we’d like to monitor the PID resolving of the datasets contained in the repository. Is there any way to do that? I guess I could register some PIDs in a general uptime monitoring service, but wouldn’t that skew the usage metrics of these datasets somehow?
Hi Philipp,
If I understand correctly, you mention that you have a research data repository in a server, that is monitored to make sure it’s up.
And, your research data repository contains PIDs that you’d like to monitor if they resolve or not.
Right now, the only way to do that is to ask for the resolution of the PIDs themselves, which will provide you information on whether the PID resolution service is reachable from your side, and whether that PID is still resolving to anything, by either waiting for the HTTP 302 back from the resolution service or by examining the response body from the resolution API service.
Yes, this would count as a resolution request, but, I don’t think it really matters, it’s not like you’re gonna be checking your dataset every hour of the day, and also, on the PID resolution service this amount of traffic is not really going to have an impact in the usage statistics.
I can understand that, by providing an endpoint to not resolve, but just check if a PID is resolvable, would separate this kind of traffic from the resolution request traffic in the aggregated usage statistics, but we haven’t come across this use case yet, as most users just ask the API for a PID resolution for many things, e.g. checking if the PID is correct, if the service is up and running, if the PID is still active… etc.
In identifiers.org, we don’t provide (yet) ID Space usage statistics, so the usage metrics for those datasets come from the resources / providers that serve those datasets, and asking for a resolution without following the HTTP 302 redirection, or without taking further action on the API response, will not affect their usage metrics.
Thanks a lot for your question, I hope my comment sheds some light into it.
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Hi Manuel,
Thanks for your detailed reply! I’m not so into APIs, but I will discuss this with our system administrator.