Help: gateway/WAN monitoring tips for a community ISP outage status map

optimumoutage

Hi everyone — looking for practical advice from people who run pfSense as the edge.

I am putting together a small community status map project called optimum outage us. The goal is to show when an ISP path looks down versus when it is just a local WiFi or LAN glitch, and to accept neighbor reports without turning into spam.

Questions for this crowd:

What gateway/WAN checks do you trust most for distinguishing true ISP outages from LAN/WiFi problems (gateway monitoring, DNS probes, multi-target ping, etc.)?
Any gotchas with cable/modem handoff that make WAN look flaky when the ISP is actually fine?
If you were designing a lightweight status board for neighbors, what would you monitor on the pfSense side that is actually useful to display?

No product pitch — just hoping for hard-won tips. Thanks!

stephenw10

@optimumoutage said in Help: gateway/WAN monitoring tips for a community ISP outage status map:

What gateway/WAN checks do you trust most for distinguishing true ISP outages from LAN/WiFi problems

Be sure to monitor something beyond the ISP gateway and preferably beyond the ISP infrastructure entirely. Using an anycast target like 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 is common and usually gives good data.