About
How VP Pulse measures UK internet health
VP Pulse aggregates public, authoritative signals from across the UK internet into a single live dashboard. Here’s the methodology, the sources, and who runs it.
What we measure
Each tile on the dashboard surfaces one infrastructure signal. Tiles update independently and write to a 30-day rolling history visible on /trends. The composite “Internet Weather” score is a deliberately simple average of the underlying tiles, normalised to 0–100. We don’t weight tiles dynamically because we want the score to be auditable and stable over time.
- DNS Resolver Race. Median resolution time across major resolvers from a UK vantage point.
- BGP Activity. Update volume and instability for UK-relevant prefixes via RIPE RIS.
- TLS Cert Watch. TLS handshake + certificate health for sampled UK-hosted domains.
- Email Auth Watch. SPF, DKIM and DMARC posture for sampled UK domains.
- Security Headers. HTTP response header hardening across sampled UK sites.
- UK Latency Probe. Round-trip latency to UK-hosted endpoints from public probes.
- IPv6 Tracker. IPv6 reachability and adoption across UK networks.
- UK ISP Status. Outage signals and degradation across major UK ISPs.
- Cloudflare Radar. UK traffic and threat anomaly indicators.
Data sources
We do not run our own probe network. VP Pulse calls public APIs from authoritative sources and caches results in a Supabase store with a 30-day retention window. Every signal you see is traceable to one of:
- Cloudflare Radar— Traffic anomalies, threat trends, AS-level signals.
- RIPE RIS / RIPEstat— BGP route updates and visibility from public collectors.
- SSL Labs— TLS configuration grading for sampled UK domains.
- Public DNS-over-HTTPS resolvers— DNS resolution latency and integrity checks across providers.
What VP Pulse is not
It is not a generic speed test, an SLA monitor for your own services, or a replacement for an enterprise NMS. It is a public situational-awareness tool for UK network operators, IT teams, journalists and anyone investigating whether a problem is “just me” or affecting the wider internet.
For per-network monitoring, scanning of your own domains, or a private deployment of the same telemetry stack, see /services.
Who runs it
VP Pulse is built and operated by VantagePoint Networks, an independent UK network engineering and consulting practice. The same telemetry, alerting and observability stacks we ship for VP Pulse power the monitoring solutions we deploy for our consulting clients.
Found a methodology issue or want to suggest a tile? Email hello@vpnetworks.co.uk.
Updates & corrections
We publish methodology changes, data-source changes and known-incident post-mortems on the blog. If a tile shows incorrect data we’d rather hear about it than not — please email us.