Hello!
I got recently pinged by a large exit operator asking whether we had a website with nice graphs and statistics relevant to relay operators on our project infrastructure (showing e.g. the largest exit operators etc.), but that's currently not the case and we should fix that. There are some third-party tools, like OrNetStats[1], but we think it would be very useful for our relay operators to have relevant information available on the Tor Project website itself. Those third-party projects are a good contribution to the overall ecosystem we have but might e.g. die at some point due to lack of maintenance or move their focus to particular parts of the network while neglecting others, which is fine in general. However, we as a project should make sure our relay operators and we ourselves are not losing important insights into the state of the network and its different relay groups in case anything like that happens.
At the end of the day those statistics and graphs should show up on metrics.torproject.org but we are not there yet given the complex nature of that website and our plans to fix that. However, thanks to our efforts of setting up a database containing all the relay descriptors and other network documents and our ongoing Google Summer of Code project for making those accessible with the help of a network status API we can start to experiment with providing those statistics early on via a different venue. I've just filed a ticket tracking that process[2] for those of you who are interested.
As always we are very much interested in collaboration and getting feedback from all of you. So, if you have particular statistics and graphs you would like to see on such a website, please speak up! Ideally, this would happen on the above-mentioned Gitlab issue but just replying to this thread or in private is fine as well.
Thanks,
Georg
[1] Relay Operator Poll | OrNetStats
[2] Provide metrics relevant to relay operators (#40091) · Issues · The Tor Project / Network Health / Metrics / Website · GitLab