Since launching Orb at the end of April, we’ve loved hearing the overwhelmingly positive feedback from Orb users and their stories of how Orb helped unmask latent issues or pinpoint the cause of nagging, intermittent connectivity interruptions. Our community, inspired by Orb’s run-anywhere continuous measurement philosophy, have asked more from us since we launched:

1. Can I keep longer than 24 hours of data?
2. Can I integrate data from all my Orbs with other platforms and devices?
3. Can I accomplish these things while keeping my data private?

We’ve been hard at work extending Orb and the Orb Cloud platform to support these desires. Today, with the launch of Orb Local API and Orb Local Analytics, all of this and so much more is now possible!

What is it?

Local API

Orb Cloud now allows you to configure your Orbs to serve up Datasets via a local HTTP API that can be accessed by other devices. By utilizing the Local API, you can retrieve all of the rich Datasets powering the Orb experience and use the data however you like:

• Scores - Orb Score, Responsiveness Score, Reliability Score, Speed Score, and supporting metrics
• Responsiveness - Lag, latency, jitter, packet loss, and more to your router and the internet
• Web Responsiveness - Web Time to First Byte (TTFB) and DNS resolution time
• Speed - Content and Peak speed test downlink and uplink

For any Orb running version 1.3 or later, you may visit Orb Cloud, click the ellipses (“...”) next to your linked Orb, and click “Edit”. Then you simply paste in a configuration, click “Save”, and your Orb is now serving up Datasets via HTTP on your specified port!

{
  "datasets.api": [
    "identifiable=true",    
    "port=8000",
    "scores_1m",
    "responsiveness_1s",
    "web_responsiveness_results",
    "speed_results"
  ]
}

Example Local API configuration

This example configuration makes Datasets available only to you, locally via API. Your data is yours and not sent to Orb Cloud or anywhere else.

Now, if you access http://[your-orb-ip-or-hostname]:8000/api/v2/datasets/speed_results.json?id=123 you will see your Speed Dataset results returned as JSON. For details on configuring and utilizing Local API, see the Datasets Configuration documentation.

Local Analytics

While Local API is a powerful capability providing you with ultimate flexibility to control your data, we also wanted to provide a turnkey solution to be able to store, visualize, and transform your data to meet your needs. Therefore, we created an open sourced (MIT License) solution, Orb Local Analytics, to make it simple for you to collect data served by Local API and have it available for querying and visualization.

Orb Local Analytics is a “TIG stack” (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana) inside of Docker containers, with a configuration script that walks you through getting data flowing as quickly and easily as possible. You can host Local Analytics on a Raspberry Pi, a Proxmox node, or any always-on machine running Docker.

As Orb Local Analytics uses Telegraf, it is easy to take the repository as a starting point and adapt it to your needs. For example, you can use the Telegraf MQTT Producer to make Orb data from multiple Orbs easily consumable by Home Assistant. The Orb team has been having a blast creating integrations for IoT pixel displays and personalized home connectivity dashboards!

For step-by-step instructions on getting started with Orb Local Analytics, see our guide.

Is everything free?

Orb, Local API, and Local Analytics will remain free forever for homelabs, enthusiasts, tinkerers, and small deployments. We hope that by using Orb and these additional features, you will fall in love with it and consider it for commercial purposes. In the coming weeks, we will launch the ability to purchase more Orbs and offer additional capabilities for power users and businesses. At that time, all existing users will be limited to a maximum of 10 Orbs associated with Orb Cloud, while new users will be limited to 5 Orbs. We believe this gives Orb users a powerful toolkit without compromises, while allowing Orb to monetize very large Orb deployments for businesses and ISPs.

What next?

We’d love to see what you create using Orb Local Analytics and Local API. If you have any questions or wish to show off, please join the Orb Discord community.