Atlas Prometheus

[Finley Chopin]

InGreek mythology, Atlas (/ˈtləs/; Greek: Ἄτλας, tlās) is a Titan condemned to hold up the heavens or sky for eternity after the Titanomachy. Atlas also plays a role in the myths of two of the greatest Greek heroes: Heracles (Hercules in Roman mythology) and Perseus. According to the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, Atlas stood at the ends of the earth in the extreme west.[1] Later, he became commonly identified with the Atlas Mountains in northwest Africa and was said to be the first King of Mauretania (modern-day Morocco and, much later, including west Algeria, not to be confused with the modern-day country of Mauritania).[2] Atlas was said to have been skilled in philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. In antiquity, he was credited with inventing the first celestial sphere. In some texts, he is even credited with the invention of astronomy itself.[3]

Atlas was the son of the Titan Iapetus and the Oceanid Asia[4] or Clymene.[5] He was a brother of Epimetheus and Prometheus.[6] He had many children, mostly daughters, the Hesperides, the Hyades, the Pleiades, and the nymph Calypso who lived on the island Ogygia.[7]

The "Atlantic Ocean" is derived from "Sea of Atlas". The name of Atlantis mentioned in Plato's Timaeus' dialogue derives from "Atlantis nesos" (Ancient Greek: Ἀτλαντὶς νῆσος), literally meaning "Atlas's Island".[8]

The etymology of the name Atlas is uncertain. Virgil took pleasure in translating etymologies of Greek names by combining them with adjectives that explained them: for Atlas his adjective is durus, "hard, enduring",[9] which suggested to George Doig[10] that Virgil was aware of the Greek τλῆναι "to endure"; Doig offers the further possibility that Virgil was aware of Strabo's remark that the native North African name for this mountain was Douris. Since the Atlas Mountains rise in the region inhabited by Berbers, it has been suggested that the name might be taken from one of the Berber languages, specifically from the word drār "mountain".[11]

Atlas and his brother Menoetius sided with the Titans in their war against the Olympians, the Titanomachy. When the Titans were defeated, many of them (including Menoetius) were confined to Tartarus, but Zeus condemned Atlas to stand at the western edge of the earth and hold up the sky on his shoulders.[13] Thus, he was Atlas Telamon, "enduring Atlas", and became a doublet of Coeus, the embodiment of the celestial axis around which the heavens revolve.[14]

A common misconception today is that Atlas was forced to hold the Earth on his shoulders, but Classical art shows Atlas holding the celestial spheres, not the terrestrial globe; the solidity of the marble globe borne by the renowned Farnese Atlas may have aided the conflation, reinforced in the 16th century by the developing usage of atlas to describe a corpus of terrestrial maps.[citation needed]

One of the Twelve Labours of the hero Heracles was to fetch some of the golden apples that grow in Hera's garden, tended by Atlas's reputed daughters, the Hesperides (which were also called the Atlantides), and guarded by the dragon Ladon. Heracles went to Atlas and offered to hold up the heavens while Atlas got the apples from his daughters.[19]

Upon his return with the apples, however, Atlas attempted to trick Heracles into carrying the sky permanently by offering to deliver the apples himself, as anyone who purposely took the burden must carry it forever, or until someone else took it away. Heracles, suspecting Atlas did not intend to return, pretended to agree to Atlas's offer, asking only that Atlas take the sky again for a few minutes so Heracles could rearrange his cloak as padding on his shoulders. When Atlas set down the apples and took the heavens upon his shoulders again, Heracles took the apples and ran away.[citation needed]

According to Plato, the first king of Atlantis was also named Atlas, but that Atlas was a son of Poseidon and the mortal woman Cleito.[21] The works of Eusebius[22] and Diodorus[3] also give an Atlantean account of Atlas. In these accounts, Atlas' father was Uranus and his mother was Gaia. His grandfather was Elium "King of Phoenicia" who lived in Byblos with his wife Beruth. Atlas was raised by his sister, Basilia.[23][24][25]

Atlas was also a legendary king of Mauretania, the land of the Mauri in antiquity roughly corresponding with modern Morocco and Algeria. In the 16th century, Gerardus Mercator put together the first collection of maps to be called an "Atlas" and devoted his book to the "King of Mauretania".[24][26]

Atlas became associated with Northwest Africa over time. He had been connected with the Hesperides, or "Nymphs", which guarded the golden apples, and Gorgons both of which were said to live beyond Ocean in the extreme west of the world since Hesiod's Theogony.[27] Diodorus and Palaephatus mention that the Gorgons lived in the Gorgades, islands in the Aethiopian Sea. The main island was called Cerna, and modern-day arguments have been advanced that these islands may correspond to Cape Verde due to Phoenician exploration.[28]

The Northwest Africa region emerged as the canonical home of the King via separate sources. In particular, according to Ovid, after Perseus turns Atlas into a mountain range, he flies over Aethiopia, the blood of Medusa's head giving rise to Libyan snakes. By the time of the Roman Empire, the habit of associating Atlas's home to a chain of mountains, the Atlas Mountains, which were near Mauretania and Numidia, was firmly entrenched.[29]

Sources describe Atlas as the father, by different goddesses, of numerous children, mostly daughters. Some of these are assigned conflicting or overlapping identities or parentage in different sources.

Ayn Rand's political dystopian novel Atlas Shrugged (1957) references the popular misconception of Atlas holding up the entire world on his back by comparing the capitalist and intellectual class as being "modern Atlases" who hold the modern world up at great expense to themselves.[citation needed]

I'm a big fan of Prometheus and time-series-based monitoring in general. While attending RIPE 74, I came up with the idea to use RIPE Atlas measurement results to improve my blackbox monitoring. The main goal was to monitor trends regarding latency, packet loss and hop counts. For example this gives me the opportunity to see impacts of changes after doing some traffic engineering. It's also helpful to see how latency changes over time and detect loss to avoid performance issues.

Since there was not an out-of-the-box solution for exporting measurement results to Prometheus, I decided to implement an exporter for the RIPE Atlas API in Go. Fortunately the Go bindings for the API were already made available by DNS-OARC which saved a lot of time.

The atlas_exporter retrieves measurement results from the RIPE Atlas API and maps them to metrics. Prometheus can scrape these metrics periodically from the HTTP endpoint provided by the application. Numeric elements in Atlas measurement results are mapped to metrics. Other key attributes become labels. As of today atlas_exporter supports almost all measurement types of RIPE Atlas. Only wifi is not supported yet, because there were no obvious choices for metrics. Currently only the last measurement result is retrieved. For future releases a time span based solution is already planned.

In my ASes I use Atlas metrics to monitor latency, packet loss and hop counts over time. An alerting based on these metrics is planned too. For example if a defined percentage of probes in a big eyeball AS can not reach my AS any more I want to be paged.

In the image below you can see a visualisation of ping and traceroute measurements in Grafana. In detail it shows the trend over one hour of latency and hop counts from 50 random probes targeting a router in one of my ASes. If there are more than one probe in the same AS the metrics of these probes are averaged.

Measurement data provided by the API does not contain AS information. For me it was important to get this information in a time efficient way. Based on the ID of the probe, atlas_exporter retrieves the AS number in a separate call per measurement result. These calls are performed in parallel. Of course it doesn't make sense to get this information during every scrape, so they are cached in memory for a defined time. There are two flags to configure the cache timers which can be set as start parameters.

By default atlas_exporter ignores invalid measurement results. For example if the measurement shows IPv6 and a probe in the resultset is not compatible with IPv6, this probe is filtered out. This behavior can be changed by setting the filter.invalid-results flag to false when starting the program.

MongoDB Atlas is a fully managed cloud database service that provides a scalable, secure, and flexible platform for hosting and managing MongoDB databases. This integration for Grafana Cloud allows users to collect metrics for monitoring a MongoDB Atlas project containing any number of clustered database deployments.

Metrics include connections, operations, deadlocks, memory usage, election counts, sharding statistics, and network metrics. These are used to provide valuable visualizations for clusters, replica sets, and individual nodes.

In order for this integration to work, you must configure your MongoDB Atlas project to use the provided Prometheus integration. Please note that only MongoDB Atlas M10 and above clusters have access to the Prometheus integration.

Please note that while following the steps to activate the Prometheus integration, you only need to worry about the basic auth credentials that get made. The rest of the configuration for the Prometheus integration can be disregarded.

To monitor your MongoDB Atlas server, you must use a discovery.http component to discover your MongoDB Atlas Prometheus endpoint and apply appropriate labels, followed by a prometheus.scrape component to scrape it.

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