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4

[You would think there would be tons of software to do this. A Google search showed tons of requests but no useful responses (and lots of links to website monitors which is not what I want.]

I am looking for a software utility (Windows XP, preferably free) that will monitor my outgoing home Internet connection. It should check the outgoing connection periodically and log when the Internet was unreachable and how long it was down.

Background: My Internet connection goes down periodically when I am browsing the web. What I am trying to figure out is if the Internet connection is going down whether I am using the computer or not.

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1  
We all know the "internet" is never down ^_^ – Nippysaurus Jul 29 '09 at 5:36
2  
That's what my ISP keeps telling me <smirk> – Robert Cartaino♦ Jul 29 '09 at 14:27

5 Answers

up vote 4 down vote accepted

Net Uptime Monitor is a really simple Windows program that continuously tests your internet connection and writes a plain text log of every failure - when it starts and how long it lasts. No complicated setup - just install and run. http://www.netuptimemonitor.com

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Your contributions may be for real, but your entire account consists of nothing but posts recommending this specific product. That is considered spamming under this site's guidelines. – Pekka 웃 Nov 24 '11 at 9:22
2  
I'm the author of Net Uptime Monitor. I discovered Superuser when Googling for interest in this kind of product. Yes, I did make several posts initially responding to specific questions looking for an internet connection monitor. Since then I have been an active participant in SuperUser, answering a number of questions on different topics and building my reputation points. I appreciate and understand the site guidelines and will continue to comply with them! – Dave Becker Jan 4 '12 at 15:24
Good program. But in my opinion, either the free trial is too limited, or the price is too high. – pinouchon May 16 '12 at 19:48
@pinouchon - At $9.95, Net Uptime Monitor barely breaks even considering payment processing, tech support time (free email support), and development time. It's a hobby, not a living! The trial allows you to use the program as often as you want for as long as you want - the only restriction is that you must restart it every 30-60 minutes. The paid version allow monitoring continuously for any length of time without user input. – Dave Becker May 22 '12 at 15:39
up vote 2 down vote

MRTG is an excellent program that does this. It is free and it has the ability to monitor a great many things.

http://oss.oetiker.ch/mrtg/

Check it out! You will not be disappointed...

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up vote 0 down vote

I know some routers have this built in - my in-laws have a dlink, and I used the reports it provided to convince the DSL provider that there were problems with the connection staying up.

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up vote 0 down vote

BitMeter might work for you. From the site:

If you want to see historical data you can use the Statistics window to see what's been going on over the last few hours, days or weeks.

It does quite a lot more than what's said in the description above, but I'm not sure if it can monitor if your connection is down. I've only used it to log how much data I transferred.

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Nice program, but doesn't directly monitor uptime. – dbkk101 Aug 26 '11 at 3:09
up vote 0 down vote

Why not just script something to ping a couple of well known sites and log the results to a file. Then set it up as a scheduled job, run it say, every 5 minutes?

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