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My cable modem seems to be getting more unreliable and suffering outages, so I want to monitor the drop-outs - if I can provide a log showing when it's faulty I should be better armed when talking to tech support.

I know I could write a script or simple application to monitor and log everything, but before I start building something that I estimate will take a few hours, but will in all likelihood consume multiple evenings and weekends, I just thought I'd check to see if there was a "off the shelf" tool that could produce nicely formatted logs and reports?

Basically any tool that will run on either a Windows 7 machine, or my Asus RTN66U router/wi-fi access point that's running the Merlin firmware.

If said tool could capture web-pages as well that would be really useful - the Virgin Media cable modem that connects to the internet has a web console that logs errors, so being able to capture this would be helpful. Unfortunately the cable modem error log is cleared when it reboots, so I need something to scrape it and capture it.

This related question covers some basic scripts: A better way to monitor my internet connection other than ping

If I just use ping to continuously monitor, are there any recommended hosts to ping to that won't object to the traffic?

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  • How/Why do you say it's the modem? Are you using a modem-router combo? Tested the cable? Are you basing your statement from LAN connection or WiFi? I do recall having problems and so I'm probing you to see if it may be similar to what happened to my setup, or what configuration fixed my problem.
    – ejbytes
    Jul 26, 2016 at 8:01
  • The symptom is that every so often every machine on my home network (both wired and on wifi) will be unable to connect to the internet. Internal traffic to my NAS drive etc is fine. The Asus router doesn't show any problems. It just looks like the cable modem simply stops transferring packets.
    – David
    Jul 26, 2016 at 8:06
  • I'm going to paste up some images (worth 100 words) as a solution. Sounds exactly what happened to me. I use Asus also.
    – ejbytes
    Jul 26, 2016 at 8:09
  • I posted an answer below. Let me know if that solved your problem.
    – ejbytes
    Jul 26, 2016 at 8:39

3 Answers 3

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Ping would be enough if it is really just about outages. You can use gping which provides a graphical result of the measures. A ping won't affect the traffic.

As for alternatives, the question you linked in the first place has already some very good ones like mtr or MRTG.

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Let's take a look at your ip address. Open cmd.exe: Windows-button+R, type cmd, ENTER. On prompt type: ipconfig

cmd.ext ipconfig

Network Sharing. LAN connection, right-click, properties.

LAN: Connector

Select IPv4, then click Properties.

Networking:LAN Connection Properties

The ip address should be the same as ipconfig from cmd.exe above. Put these values in as "static values". Note the "preferred DNS".

enter image description here

Click OK to accept changes. Your intermittent connectivity should be gone now.

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  • I had already set my main laptop up so everything is statically defined :-) So yes, my main laptop is already set up like this, but it's still having issues. I'm reasonably sure it's a problem either with the cable modem, or the physical connection back to the ISP, but like I said, it's annoyingly intermittent :-)
    – David
    Jul 26, 2016 at 9:15
  • Hey you got it. Double check the DNS, 8888 and 8844, that could help.
    – ejbytes
    Jul 26, 2016 at 9:18
  • @David It was a lot of extra stuff because I wasn't sure about your background, but the main thing and point in all that is the DNS. Make sure you are using 8888 and 8844. I had the same issue as you did.
    – ejbytes
    Jul 26, 2016 at 9:30
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You should be able to look at the router log files. This will show connection and disconnection events. Something like this:

14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.850000) PPPoE is up -​ Down Rate=79903Kbps, Up Rate=19999Kbps; SNR Margin Down=12.2dB, Up=15.2dB
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.840000) CHAP authentication successful
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.760000) CHAP Receive Challenge
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.760000) Starting CHAP authentication with peer
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.760000) PPP LCP Receive Configuration ACK
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.750000) PPP LCP Send Configuration Request
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.750000) PPP LCP Receive Configuration Reject
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.750000) PPP LCP Send Configuration ACK
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.750000) PPP LCP Receive Configuration Request
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.750000) PPP LCP Send Configuration Request
14:52:13, 18 May.   (12682375.760000) PTM over DSL is up
14:48:33, 18 May.   (12682155.340000) PTM over DSL is down after 211367 minutes uptime
14:48:33, 18 May.   (12682155.340000) PPPoE is down after 211367 minutes uptime [Waiting for Underlying Connection (WAN Ethernet 2 -​ Down)]
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