Best of the ISP-Lists

Fixed Wireless Technology

Seeing With Pings

In addition to detailed network monitoring at the NOC at the core of the network, ISPs say everybody should have a monitor looking in from outside.

[September 26, 2006]

On the ISP-Wireless list in September, CS asked:

Does anyone use a third-party, offsite monitoring service for notification of downed servers, etc? I just tried http://www.pingdom.com/ but it's incredibly lousy. It allows monitoring of IP/port combination but no matter what combination I specified, it reported the server as down. Also, their notification server is listed on the SpamHaus blacklist which really doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in their service. So, is there anything better? I have internal monitoring set up but it would be nice to have an external service.

BD posted a link http://www.securityspace.com/netmon/index.html and wrote:

We use the following one: http://www.bello-monitors-the.net/home

[SC advised] "Use your own monitoring tools like WhatsUp Gold or any of the rest of the bunch. If you want to know from [outside your network] what doesn't work, just program something external into your monitoring system to be monitored. If some server in Kentucky can ping you, then you should be able to ping it too, and if it can't ping you, then you should have a problem pinging it too.

There is only one advantage to having external monitoring and that is so you get an e-mail to a paging or mobile device like a phone. There are disadvantages that go along with external monitoring as well—the first that comes to mind is costs.

A good way around it would be to pair with someone on this list so you (and them) can monitor each other without cost to either of you. Hey—what a concept! I'd be willing to do this with one other select (I am picky) WISP on this list that has at least two upstream providers with their own IP space / BGP. Hit me off-list."

[TJ recommended] "We actually purchased a cable internet connection just for this purpose. We setup What's Up Gold on a machine that uses the cable connection to the internet, but also has our internal IP addresses on it to check services. We only monitor our services that if they go down, our normal monitor server would not be able to alert via SMS (primary email server, primary backbone routers, etc.). It works very well."

[CS replied] "That's what I do right now. DSL connection but the same thing. However, it's actually amazing how often sprint, AT&T, MCI and the other big backbone providers screw up routing in one way or another or just simply die for a while from cable cuts, power outages, etc. You would never know, unless you regularly and consistently visit the looking glass sites and use them how often a route is messed up after an outage—planned or unplanned.

That's why I wanted multiple outside routes back to our edge router. Monitoring server uptime is one thing. Making sure folks can get to those servers is something else."

—End