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BenMorel
Asked: 2011-11-19 10:10:10 +0800 CST

Software to diagnose (ping) a network over 24h?

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We've been experiencing a lot of problems with our current office's internet connection lately: slowdowns, packet losses, huge ping times, etc.

(Un)fortunately, this is not happening all the day, just a few minutes here and there, several times a day, but that makes our working day a pain.

As Murphy's law dictates, when the IT guy pops up, the internet works just fine, ping is good, bandwidth is normal.

As they won't do anything more for us without further proof of failure, is there a good and simple tool (on whatever platform) that will monitor the connection for 24h (pinging Google every second, for example) and display the results as a graph of the ping time + packet losses at anytime of the day?

I gave a try PingPlotter, but that didn't work as intended for me.

networking network-monitoring internet

5 Answers

  1. I would setup a copy of smokeping on some system on your network. It doesn't ping every second, and you probably don't need it do. Instead it will periodically send out a burst of ~20 pings at the same time, and then count how many respond, and how fast each returns. The results are graphed.

    Here is results for my a system at home, over my Comcast connection, to something at work. The missed packets and latency is on the Comcast side.

    enter image description here

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  2. Best Answer

    If you have access to a linux machine then mtr may do what you want. mtr combines the functionality of the traceroute and ping programs in a single network diagnostic tool

    This is the kind of output you get when run in report mode. You could just leave it running and gather statistics over any period of time.

    mtr -r -c 10 google.com
HOST: host1.lan                   Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1. ns.lan                        0.0%    10    0.3   0.5   0.3   0.6   0.1
  2. 192.168.1.254                 0.0%    10   81.2  76.0  66.9  89.1   8.3
  3. 94-192-160-1.zone6.bethere.c 60.0%    10  2335. 1419. 1024. 2335. 620.4
  4. 10.1.3.245                   80.0%    10   17.3  17.6  17.3  17.9   0.4
  5. 10.1.2.169                   90.0%    10   28.1  28.1  28.1  28.1   0.0
  6. ???                          100.0    10    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
  7. 64.233.175.27                70.0%    10   23.5  23.6  23.4  23.8   0.2
  8. ???                          100.0    10    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
  9. ???                          100.0    10    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
 10. ???                          100.0    10    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
 11. ???                          100.0     8    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
 12. 173.194.67.147                0.0%     5   29.1  29.2  28.7  29.8   0.4
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  3. You could just dump the output of ping to a file (ie ping google.com > pings.txt) and review the latency times. No graph, but works on basically every platform and should provide ample proof of any problems the network is experiencing.

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  4. Pingdom has a free service that may do what you need.

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  5. Nagios is an open source server monitoring tool that has the ability to monitor servers. I know that for SNMP monitors you have to configure things on the device being monitored but for simple ping monitors you shouldn't.

    Here in our office we use WhatsUp Gold to monitor all our servers. It does have a ping monitor that does exactly what you're wanting. It's a pricey product ($2000+) which makes it a ridiculous solution to your problem, but they do have a free 30 day trial that you could install, gather data, and hopefully figure out your problem.

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