RippleNet Home overview

RippleNet Home is the browser-based portal for your RippleNet Home instance. It provides a clear window on RippleNet activities that take place through your instance, and lets you take basic actions to work with accounts, payments, and other user-manageable instance features.

RippleNet Home presents a quick view of current status such as your and your connection partners' RippleNet instance health. You can drill down for more details such as viewing the specifics of any and all payments, checking out information about your connection partners, and inspecting the details of the accounts you use for transactions.

You can also take action through RippleNet Home. For example, you can:

• Troubleshoot payments that have failed or hung
• Manage RippleNet Home users and their permissions to control user access
• Create and manage RippleNet accounts
• Define your institution’s RippleNet profile
• Initiate new payments for low-frequency treasury or bulk transactions (only for some institutions)

RippleNet Home solutions

RippleNet Home provides tools that solve problems for a variety of users who range from operators to managers with gradations in between.

Operators

Operators are the users most likely to work frequently with RippleNet Home as they shepherd payments through RippleNet.

Monitor and troubleshoot payments

Payments are the principal activity that an institution carries out in RippleNet. Not all payments go through without a hitch, so it can be critical to locate payments that have difficulties and troubleshoot to determine what went wrong and how to fix it.

RippleNet Home can display all of an institution's payments, but can also filter them to target a specific set of payments. Filtering works by multiple parameters that can combine to target by sender, receiver, date range, accounts used, currency, amount, and state (to see if it’s hung or failed) among other parameters.

After filtering, to get a desired set of payment records, an operator can look at the details of any of the payments to see the stages the payment went through and its current status. The operator can perform detailed troubleshooting by looking into a JSON object for the payment object and the object’s event trail.

Create new payments

Most institutions handle new payment creation through automated calls to the RippleNet API because there are too many payments per day for humans to handle directly. Some institutions, though, use RippleNet for bulk or treasury payments that may only occur a few times per day. These institutions may not want to create automation through the API to handle those payments.

If so, the institution can contact their Ripple account manager, who can configure RippleNet Home with a new payment option. The option allows an operator to specify a new payment along with the parameters for a payment quote.

Administrators

Administrators, who might include operations personnel, manage RippleNet Home use and keep operations running smoothly. They can use the payment tools to handle problematic payments, and they have additional administrative tools.

Manage RippleNet Home users

Because RippleNet Home exposes financial information that may be sensitive, it’s critical to be able to control which people have access to RippleNet Home and to define what actions each user can take within RippleNet Home.

An administrator can add and remove RippleNet Home users, and can set permissions for each of those users. Permissions include read and edit capability for payments, accounts, connections, credentials, and other RippleNet Home features. The permissions controls include a collection of permission sets that—with a single click—set a user’s permissions appropriate for the user’s role. Permission sets define permissions, for example, for operators, integrators, and support personnel. An administrator can further modify a permission set once it’s applied.

Ripple sets up an institution's first administrator for RippleNet Home. That administrator can then add a small set of additional administrators to help with administrative duties.

Monitor instance health

RippleNet Cloud instances must be healthy and operating at full capacity for transactions to take place between your institution and your connected partner institutions. It’s important to know if any of those instances (including your own) aren’t operating.

RippleNet Home constantly monitors the heartbeat of your RippleNet instance and the instances of connected partners to see if they’re running or not, and displays which instances are up or down. This display is prominently visible to everyone using RippleNet Home, so other users can notify an administrator to work on any health problems that appear.

Managers

Managers are a general group that includes people such as project managers, business planners, and technical integrators who may not have daily interactions with RippleNet Home. They use RippleNet Home features to configure their instance to set up and modify connections, accounts, and other business arrangements through which transactions take place.

Check on partner connections

Payments require partner institutions and connections to those partners' RippleNet instances. Institutions set up partner connections by working with their Ripple contact. Once set up, managers can view connections and their instance health status in RippleNet Home. They can also view both connected and non-connected institutions (possible partners) with details about each institution that include country of operation, supported currencies, time zone, time to credit, holidays, and contacts.

Set up and manage accounts

Payments through partners require sending and receiving RippleNet accounts. A manager can create both vostro and nostro accounts through RippleNet Home, defining currency, minimum and maximum allowed balances, and other features for the account.

RippleNet Home displays the current balance of each account, and provides controls that allow managers to see all transactions within an account. Managers can also arrange for transfers among accounts.

Define the institution’s profile

An institution’s RippleNet profile provides the information displayed about the institution in a list of connected or potentially connected partners displayed by RippleNet Home. A manager can use RippleNet Home to specify their institution’s profile: country, supported currencies, contact information, and so on.

Developers

An institution’s software developers create the institution’s middleware that works with the RippleNet API to carry out RippleNet activities. Developers don’t typically have much to do with RippleNet Home other than taking into account RippleNet Home features that they don’t have to duplicate through middleware. There are, however, a few features that developers will want to use.

Manage and retrieve API credentials

The RippleNet API requires credentials for endpoint access. RippleNet Home provides a place to generate and rotate API keys for use by an institution’s middleware. An institution can have up to three active keys, one for each operating environment. Operating environments are typically test, UAT (user acceptance testing), and production.

Determine and specify Ripple payment object schemas

An institution that receives payments over RippleNet specifies one or more Ripple Payment Object (RPO) schemas. Each schema defines required information to make a type of payment to the institution—payment information for a location that has specific legal requirements, for example.

A developer who creates middleware that handles payments to a partner needs to know the partner’s appropriate RPO schemas so that the middleware can supply required information. RippleNet Home provides access to a connected partner’s RPO schemas. The developer can read the full JSON specification of each published RPO schema.

A payment receiving institution can use RippleNet Home to define and list all the RPO schemas it offers.

Define a RippleNet Cloud IP Allowlist

An institution’s middleware connects to the institution’s RippleNet instance to carry out activities through the RippleNet API. These connections come from IP addresses outside RippleNet. To ensure security, a developer can use RippleNet Home to specify a RippleNet Cloud IP allowlist. The allowlist is a list of IP addresses used by the institution’s middleware that have permission to connect to the institution’s instance. Connections from other IP addresses are prohibited.

A quick tour of RippleNet Home

RippleNet Home provides a set of pages for each type of activity you can carry out.

Home page

The Home page presents a quick overall view of your RippleNet instance. Tiles show your company profile and the health of you and your partners' instances. They also provide a link to support. At the upper right of the home page and of each RippleNet Home page is a question mark icon that links to RippleNet documentation that describes RippleNet Home, important concepts, and how the RippleNet API handles activities outside the scope of RippleNet Home.

Payments page

The Payments page displays a list of payments completed, failed, or still in progress with the option to look at the details of any single payment, including troubleshooting information. Because payments over the life of a RippleNet instance can number in the many thousands or even millions, filtering options whittle that down to a meaningful slice that can show exactly the payment set you’re interested in. You can also download payment data for processing with your own tools.

As described previously, a few institutions with minimal payment requirements can ask Ripple to configure their instance to include a New Payment page where an operator can manually request a new payment.

Accounts page

The Accounts page displays ledgers of both your RippleNet accounts and your connected partners' RippleNet accounts available for payments. This includes both nostro and vostro accounts and disabled accounts. You can examine the details of any single account, and can transfer money in and out of the account from other accounts. You can also use this page to create a new account.

Connections page

The Connections page presents a list of other RippleNet-enrolled institutions that are available as partners, including your institution’s currently connected partners. You can view the profile of any institution listed here. Each profile contains information about where the institution operates, its time zone, its contacts, and more. Each profile also lists the Ripple Payment Object (RPO) schemas the institution uses, which is important information for your developers as they set up payment mechanisms for a partner.

This page also presents the instance health of your partners.

Other institutions viewing this page can find your institution’s profile.

Settings page

The Settings page collects tools used for RippleNet Home configuration and RippleNet API use.

Users page

The Users page lists currently enrolled RippleNet Home users with options to examine and edit each user’s attributes and permissions. It also provides a page for adding new users, and offers the option of deleting users who no longer need access to RippleNet Home.

Company Profile page

The Company Profile page provides a way to edit the information in your institution’s profile as it appears to other institutions. Your profile includes the set of Ripple Payment Object (RPO) schemas that your institution uses to accept different types of payments. You can upload JSON files defining each RPO schema you support.

Credentials page

Your institution’s middleware uses an API credential to access RippleNet API operations. You can use the Credentials page to request up to three different API credentials, typically one for each environment (test, UAT, and production) in which your instance operates. You can rotate a credential at any time to set a new key.

RippleNet Cloud IP Allowlist page

Your institution’s middleware connects to your RippleNet instance to carry out activities through the RippleNet API. To ensure secure connections, you can use RippleNet Home to specify an IP allowlist, a collection of IP addresses allowed to connect to your instance. Your instance will refuse connections from any addresses not on the list.