On Tuesday 24 May 2011 16:43:46 John Mort wrote:
> Can anyone recommend a tool to track network uptime?  Some work was done on
> one of my building's network connection and users are reporting that there
> are intermittent outages.  I'd like some way of pinging a location once a
> second or minute or so and tracking that over a long period of time like a
> few days or a week to see if there are any patterns to the outages and how
> long/often they are occurring.

One of the things we found experimentally was that using the response of a 
single ping as the method of ascertaining success/failure of a network 
connection could mis-trigger too easily.  As such the method used at a company 
I worked for was to send 3 successive pings 5 seconds apart, and only to 
consider the connection as failed if /all 3/ pings had failed.  [Note: this 
can be done using command line switches to the ping command, so this doesn't 
require fancy scripting to accomplish.]  This check was run every 15 minutes 
via cron, which sent email to netadmins upon failure.  This worked well enough 
that we didn't feel like it needed fixing.  It caught he intermittent internet 
connection failures we had between buildings as well as our own internal 
internet connectivity failures.

If you want to get more fancy, I'd probably log the connection loss times via 
a CSV file and then make a text-based graph sent via email as the connection 
continues to fail checks.  If you want something even more fancy I suppose you 
could make a picture graph with rrdtool to attach in an email.

Others have recommended the 'mon' package to me in the past for things like 
this, as well as Nagios and other tools.

  -- Chris

--
Chris Knadle
[email protected]
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