🤖 Overview

Spatineo Serval Controller is an automated crawler operated by Spatineo Oy, a Finnish geospatial technology company founded in 2009 and headquartered in Helsinki. The bot is a core component of the Spatineo Monitoring and Alerting platform, designed to periodically harvest metadata and availability metrics from OGC Web Services — including WMS, WMTS, WFS, and WCS — as well as Esri ArcGIS REST endpoints and Tiled Map Services. Its primary purpose is to provide real-time performance monitoring, uptime tracking, and capability document parsing for geospatial data providers worldwide. The collected data feeds into Spatineo’s public dashboard and private alerts, enabling operators to detect service degradation or misconfiguration.

🌐 Technical Behavior

The Serval Controller employs a scheduled, IP-based crawling strategy that targets specific service endpoints defined by Spatineo’s registry. It issues HTTP GET requests to the base URLs of known map services, typically appending standard parameters such as request=GetCapabilities for OGC services. Crawl frequency is configurable per endpoint but defaults to once every 15 to 30 minutes for active monitoring, making it more aggressive than typical search engine bots. The bot uses IPv4 addresses drawn from ASN 201845 (Spatineo Oy) and a smaller secondary range registered to the company. All requests originate from Helsinki, Finland, with a reverse DNS suffix of .spatineo.com. The bot supports both HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2 protocols and includes a Accept: application/xml header to retrieve XML-based capability documents.

📋 robots.txt Compliance

Based on Spatineo’s official documentation at spatineo.com/serval-controller/robots-policy/, the Serval Controller fully respects robots.txt directives. It parses the file before each crawl cycle and will not access any path explicitly disallowed under the User-agent: Spatineo Serval Controller rule. Additionally, the bot observes the Crawl-delay directive if present, throttling requests accordingly. Spatineo states that the controller checks for updates to robots.txt at least once every 24 hours.

🔍 Detection Indicators

The primary User-Agent string is Spatineo Serval Controller/2.0 (with version numbers varying between 1.0 and 2.0), though Spatineo also registers the generic SpatineoBot as an alternative. Behavioral fingerprints include repeated requests to the same endpoint at regular sub-hour intervals, a From header containing [email protected], and a User-Agent string that always includes the word “Spatineo”. No Referer or Cookie headers are sent. These characteristics allow web administrators to identify the bot in access logs without ambiguity.

📊 Data Usage

All data collected by the Serval Controller is used exclusively for Spatineo’s Cloud Monitoring Service, which generates uptime percentages, response time averages, and error rate statistics for each monitored geospatial service. Spatineo does not store or repurpose the full capability documents for any AI training or advertising; data retention is limited to aggregated metrics for a rolling 90-day window. The results are displayed on Spatineo’s public status pages and can be integrated into third-party monitoring tools via REST API.

⚙️ Rate Limiting Policy

Rate limiting is recommended because the Serval Controller polls endpoints as frequently as every 15 minutes, which can significantly increase server load if many services are monitored simultaneously. Spatineo advises operators to implement threshold-based blocking — for example, allowing no more than 100 requests per minute per IP — but emphasizes that the bot is legitimate and should not be completely blocked, as it provides valuable uptime visibility for geospatial data providers.

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