Re: Pinging a Device Every Second

[Raymond Burkholder <ray () oneunified net>]

On 2018-12-15 11:32 a.m., Colton Conor wrote:
> The problem I am trying to solve is to accurately be able to tell a 
> customer if their home internet connection was up or down.  Example, 
> customer calls in and says my internet was down for 2 minutes 
> yesterday. We need to be able to verify that their internet connection 
> was indeed down. Right now we have no easy way to do this. Getting 
> metrics like packet loss and jitter would be great too, though I 
> realize ICMP data path does not always equal customer experience as 
> many network device prioritize ICMP traffic. However ICMP pings over 
> the internet do usually accurately tell if a customers modem is indeed 
> online or not.

I've found that this is a multi-faceted problem.

Looking at pings or smokeping is part of the solution, but may cause 
false negatives themselves, when considering the next point --

Another aspect is congestion.  Large uploads or downloads can cause 
packet loss (including dropping the pings with which you are testing).  
Therefore management packets such as these could be marked and 
processed, on your side at least, with a higher priority.

Someone else mentioned radius (or similar authentication/authorization 
logging mechanism), which will provide an answer if the session did in 
fact drop or not, for those types of connections.

DHCP address changeovers can cause outages.

It has also been common to get the 'internet is out' call when DNS is 
unavailable for whatever reason.  With out name resolution, most eyeball 
functions will fail.

Raymond.