Monitoring ISP uptime

[occamsrazor]

Hi,

I have my pfSense on a Qotom unit setup as follows:

ISP > fiber > ISP modem > Ethernet > Qotom/pfSense

I then have…..

System > Routing > Gateways > Edit > Monitoring IP set to ping Google DNS 8.8.8.8 with probe interval 1 second.

All of this works fine and correctly shows me when the ISP line is down etc.

But I would like to be able to see some kind of graph or other information showing me how frequently and for how long the line goes down over the last few days. Is there something inbuilt that shows this? Or how else to accomplish?

Thanks...

[johnpoz]

You pinging google doesn't actually mean your ISP is down… Just means you getting to 8.8.8.8 is down.. Could be reasons outside your isp control, etc.

Vs monitoring this sort of thing outbound.  I would monitor it inbound, to your wan IP.  I use uptime robot for this - its free.  You get text/email messages when your line is down, etc. You can do up to 50 monitors for free.. With 5 min interval.. If you want better monitoring you can upgrade to pro for a few bucks a month.

It gives you stats on your uptime, etc.  In the last 30 days mine is bit low - because I had a change of ISPs in that time period.. And was done for hours, and then it took me a bit to update my dns to point to my new IP, etc..

[occamsrazor]

@johnpoz:

You pinging google doesn't actually mean your ISP is down… Just means you getting to 8.8.8.8 is down.. Could be reasons outside your isp control, etc.

Yes that's a fair point. Although where I live it's much more likely to be the ISP than a route-to-google issue, and happy to accept that factor.

@johnpoz:

Vs monitoring this sort of thing outbound.  I would monitor it inbound, to your wan IP.  I use uptime robot for this - its free.  You get text/email messages when your line is down, etc. You can do up to 50 monitors for free.. With 5 min interval.. If you want better monitoring you can upgrade to pro for a few bucks a month.

Interesting, I hadn't thought of monitoring the inbound - I will definitely give uptime robot a try, thank you. I'd still be interested if there is a way to have the inbuilt monitoring shown as a graph however…..

[johnpoz]

The quality graph will give you a graph..  Its under status, monitoring - change it to your quality graph for your gateway you want to look at.

Reason you want to monitor from outside for such things.. Hard to get alert from our internal system when the internal systems internet connection is down ;)  There are plenty of FREE such sites to do simple monitoring that you can leverage.. statuscake is another one, etc..

[JKnott]

@johnpoz:

You pinging google doesn't actually mean your ISP is down… Just means you getting to 8.8.8.8 is down.. Could be reasons outside your isp control, etc.

When  was experiencing problems, a few years ago, I wrote a script that pinged my ISPs gateway and logged the failures.  If you can't reach the gateway, you can't reach anywhere else.

[KOM]

https://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/

I use this in a VM to monitor our links.

[occamsrazor]

@johnpoz:

The quality graph will give you a graph..  Its under status, monitoring - change it to your quality graph for your gateway you want to look at.

Reason you want to monitor from outside for such things.. Hard to get alert from our internal system when the internal systems internet connection is down ;)  There are plenty of FREE such sites to do simple monitoring that you can leverage.. statuscake is another one, etc..

Thanks! While noting what you say about the advantages of inbound monitoring, this is what I was looking for but couldn't find.