Thinkbroadband ping monitor

[Calum]

Link - http://www.thinkbroadband.com/ping
(Requires you to sign up for a free account to use the service)

This is a little different to most product reviews and recommendations, in that it's not really a product but a service, provided by thinkbroadband.com.  I don't know how well I'm going to explain this so I would recommend reading through the info on their site, but I'll give this a go.

Basically, what this service does is ping your IP every second, and store the results - minimum latency, average latency, maximum latency, and packet loss.  Doesn't sound too useful on the face of it.  However, put those results onto a graph - and not just any graph, a nicely coloured one! - and you have something potentially very useful.  You can see how your connection changes over time, for example if your ISP implements traffic management at peak times, or when you're downloading a lot of data you can see how that affects your latency.  So, how is that useful?  Well, if you seem to always have problems playing online games, you can use this to determine if your connection is always bad, or if it goes bad at certain times.  If you're experiencing problems with VOIP such as Skype, perhaps your issue is high packet loss - this shouldn't happen, but if it does, the graph will show this, and give you some information so you can speak to your ISP and resolve the issue.  If your connection seems much slower than it should be, well, this doesn't show your bandwidth but if your latency is consistently high, this could indicate either a congested link to your ISP, or an issue on the line.  Also, because ping packets are tiny, there's nothing to worry about in terms of bandwidth usage - they quote around 70MB a month.  If your IP changes, you will need to update your profile to keep the graph alive and accurate.

For an example of what the graph looks like, click here - that's a static graph of my connection over the last 24 hours.  Their FAQ section will explain in great detail how to interpret your graph, and I'm still getting used to this so I'm admittedly not the most knowledgeable, but I'll attempt to explain what this shows.  I have a fairly thin green section, which doesn't spike, so I have a nice steady minimum ping, which is a good thing.  The blue section also remains fairly steady, so my average latency mostly remains low, also good.  You can see between 6pm and 10pm the yellow section has a general upwards trend, this could be due to me downloading a lot, or it could be traffic management in place.  I know I was making fairly heavy use of my connection around those times, so this is expected.  The fairly random yellow spikes are also nothing to worry about, they're a peculiarity of some routers and connections.  I have no red line at the top, so no packet loss, which is great.  So, in short, this shows a fairly healthy connection with no issues with high latency, packet loss, or traffic shaping - hurrah!

I probably haven't explained this all too well, but hopefully this will inspire a few of you to head over to the site and check it out.  There's nothing to lose by setting it up, and once done you don't have to worry about a thing, it'll keep the graph updated and keep it online for you to view at any time, so you can look back over past days or weeks to see any changes to your connection.  Again, this is on of those tools that you may never need, but is potentially a very useful source of information (and something cool to look at).

[jormeno]

Sounds like an awesome tool I am sure people will find it useful.

[Calum]

Thanks, I certainly hope so!
I've never come across anything similar to it so I wanted to share it with the community.

[DaveLembke]

Interesting... going to check this out and register with one of my alias junk e-mail accounts to avoid spam flooding my regular e-mail.

A few years ago, I was assisted here at CH with a way to log my PING output to CSV with MIN, MAX, Average. I have used this a bunch of times to graph my networks with excel graphs.

Recorded some interesting latency spikes as well as can see how my latency rises from minimum of 30ms to around 60ms through Comcast at around 9:30am each day and it doesnt drop back to 30ms until after around 10:30pm. The large latency spikes through Comcast are also in a pattern such as a large spike that always happens before the transition from 60ms to 30ms when people are shutting off their computers and are going to sleep. Not quite sure why every night there is that spike at this transition period when the connection to my ISP all of a sudden gets fewer requests for internet traffic and a sudden drop in packet volume.

One website that I was monitoring and trying to find a solution for was www.yahoo.com. If I ping it I get very bad latency. I was hoping that I would be able to ping it a few times and find all the alternate IP's they use for their domain points of presence and find one that was nice and quick among the many that are crap, and then be able to just make a hosts file entry to point directly to this IP in relation to www.yahoo.com and skip the random point of presence connection that I get from the DNS. But they are all crappy 100 to 1000 ms and sometimes request too long etc. Yet I ping www.google.com and I am getting nice and strong responses of less than 80ms and mostly 30-50ms.

[DaveLembke]

Here is data I collected with my batch file that pinged and collected 1 minute log samples to a CSV file.

The rise in average latency (educated assumption is customers waking up and giving comcasts infrastructure exercise until most go to sleep.) The interval values are in minutes for each sample collected and colors are given for MIN,MAX, and Average.



[recovering disk space, attachment deleted by admin]

[Calum]

Interesting... going to check this out and register with one of my alias junk e-mail accounts to avoid spam flooding my regular e-mail.

I've had no spam from them, they're a respected website and have little to gain from doing so.  I've received exactly two emails - one with a link to activate my account, the second confirming my registration.

The service they provide is pretty much identical to what you've set up, the advantage is theirs would be easier for a less advanced user, and that because the ping is coming from their end and not yours, it doesn't matter if you shut your PC down, as long as the modem remains online.  Of course, the flipside is that yours will work even if your IP changes, so there are good and bad sides to both.