Networking – How to monitor the ISP’s connection quality over time

internet connectionispnetworkingping

I've got a very bad ISP and want to monitor the connection quality over a month's time.

At the moment I just wrote a script which logs ping requests to Google's DNS server 8.8.8.8.

How can I do that more efficiently? Is there a better way to achieve long term monitoring?

Or a command line tool to measure the bandwidth? Then i could run a cronjob to do this.

Best Answer

You can monitor connection quality over time with SmokePing. In a single graph you get round-trip time, jitter and packet loss. Excellent to monitor links.

Example of graph generated by SmokePing

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Networking – Better Ways to Monitor Internet Connection Other Than Ping

You are looking for mtr. I always leave mtr 8.8.8.8 running.

If you're not familiar with 8.8.8.8, it's Google's global DNS service, using anycast, so you always get a nearby node, and it's a dead easy IP to remember. So it works no matter where you are located, and if you move.

Once mtr starts press d once, then you'll see the last X pings, beautiful.

                            My traceroute  [v0.82]
host.local (0.0.0.0)                                   Sat Jun 14 14:10:27 2014
Keys:  Help   Display mode   Restart statistics   Order of fields   quit

                             Last  50 pings
 1. 192.168.1.1              .....?.........?...............?.........??.......
 2. 87.186.224.71            ..................................................
 3. 87.190.171.194           ..................................................
 4. b-ea6-i.B.DE.NET.DTAG.DE ..................................................
 5. 194.25.211.30            ..................................................
 6. 209.85.249.182           ..................................................
 7. 66.249.95.175            ..................................................
 8. 216.239.48.53            ..................................................
 9. 0.0.0.0                  ??????????????????????????????????????????????????
10. google-public-dns-a.goog .................................................?

Scale:  .:3 ms  1:6 ms  2:9 ms  3:17 ms  a:35 ms  b:53 ms  c:85 ms

Pro tip: Stretch your window to the last 200 pings... :-)

Internet Connection – Tools to Diagnose Connection Issues

I suppose it's possible your ISP has a Path MTU Discovery black hole somewhere and doesn't realize it. Try setting your MTU down to 1400 or even 1000 and see if the problem goes away. If it does, then try to find the highest setting that doesn't show the problem.

You could also leave a ping running against some host deep within your ISP (like a web or mail server, not just your local router), and see what kinds of latencies and drop percentages you get.

Also, some DNS resolvers (clients) use all DNS server addresses in a round-robin manner. See what DNS server addresses your hosts and your router are using, and use a DNS testing tool like host, dig, or nslookup, or any number of GUI tools or web apps, to make sure all of the DNS servers you're using a really up and reachable and responding quickly.

Best Answer

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Networking – Better Ways to Monitor Internet Connection Other Than Ping

Internet Connection – Tools to Diagnose Connection Issues

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