What software do you use to detect an internect connection drop?

Question

I'm looking for a piece of software to detect drops in my internet connection and log those drops. OS doesn't really matter since I have pretty much everything running here, although something on OSX would be nice. I also don't really care how it determines that connection has been dropped, but I think that there must be something better than a ping or at least a combination of a ping and something else.

Answer 1

Try checking your router, to see if it does (or can do) logging. I know plenty of routers will log a connection coming up and connections dropping - they're seen all the time in broadband forums when users are diagnosing information.

Answer 2

Perhaps you want an IP Watchdog.

Answer 3

I use software called Alchemy Eye, it has several nice features and logs when things go down or come back up. It's not free though.

www.alchemy-lab.com

Answer 4

Haven't tested it myself but Pinglog looks like something you could use.

Answer 5

Minor comment: I'm a bit confused by the term "internet connection", since internet works by passing IP packets and this is pretty much stateless. I like to use the term "connection" in context of higher level TCP/UDP.

If by "internet connection down" you mean "can't access anything", you are correct that ping is not the best way (yet it's perhaps the simplest one) to debug issues.

For debugging this I'm using mtr which is basically a mix of ping and traceroute. There's also a Windows version called WinMTR. All you can do is issue:

$ mtr hostname

If you choose a well known host that is likely to be up (google.com for example), you will see a list of hops (like traceroute does, but updated interactively) and reply times from them (like ping does).

If your internet connection is down, you will see this breaking at certain hop. At this point is usually easy to debug that not only you have a problem, but where it is: is it either your own computer/router, your ISP infrastructure or somewhere outside your provider.

There's different plans for each of these cases:

1. If it's you, you can try to debug and fix the issue yourself. May happen due to failing network hardware, not receiving an IP due to DHCP failure etc.

2. If it's your ISP, you can call their tech support and show them your mtr log or at least tell them the IP/hostname that blocks traffic from passing further. Ideally, a good ISP would monitor its infrastructure automatically and would know about failures before raging users start heating up the support phones, but unfortunately that isn't always the case :-)

3. If it's a problem outside your ISP, best thing is probably to wait a bit. In this case your ISP will behave like you in 2. and will bug its own upstream internet provider until problem gets fixed.