Gateway monitoring IP

darcey

I have a single WAN connection and up until now I've used an IP within my ISP's infrastructure as the monitoring target. It's dawned on me that much of the latency spikes and dropped packets I see are due to the load of that host and aren't representative of network state. I tried some of the high perfomance public DNS servers, and monitoring results are much improved.
My question is, should I be doing this? Is it considered OK to ping say, google's DNS 24 hours a day, twice per second?
Advice gratefully received.

Rico

You can use any Internet host which is most reliable for you.
Yes I like to use Googles DNS or Cloudflare 1.1.1.1

-Rico

darcey

@rico said in Gateway monitoring IP:

You can use any Internet host which is most reliable for you.

Thanks. I was thinking more about the etiquette/ethics of doing so. I recall way back being told it was bad form.
I initially chose a host within my ISP's network. Thinking being that since I was paying them for connectivity, seemed reasonable to ping one of their boxes. But results lead me to believe it forgoes replying when things get busy.

viragomann

@darcey said in Gateway monitoring IP:

I initially chose a host within my ISP's network. Thinking being that since I was paying them for connectivity, seemed reasonable to ping one of their boxes.

Agree. However, this doesn't necessarily detect possibly issues inside the ISPs network, for instance a miss-routing of a subnet inside or outside of his network. Both issues seen already.

stephenw10

Yes pinging something external is going to give you a much better idea of connectivity.

And also yes, Google is under no obligation to respond to ping at 8.8.8.8 and might just stop at some point. Though if they did I imagine it the fallout would be.... interesting!
I'm not aware of any rate limits on it though, I've never seen it blocked. You could change the rate it pings at. I use a much lower rate on cell connections where I'm paying for those pings.

Steve

darcey

Thanks all for the advice. I have set it to 8.8.8.8 and increased the probe/alert intervals.