May 03, 2005

Curious George: Internet monitor. I am having lots of trouble finding a good Win app that will monitor my Internet connection minute-by-minute and tell me when the connection was up or down (Web down, DNS down, etc). Most of the programs I've found are good at alerting on outages but are poor on logging them. Any ideas here?
  • There are a couple of Firefox extensions that monitor Internet usage/bandwidth, and browser uptime, but I'm not sure they do what you're looking for...
  • Ethereal is a good monitor, but I'm not aware of its logging capabilities.
  • My idea is long-winded. To summarise: write your own using a script (I'd suggest perl) and whatever Windows uses to schedule events. Every minute call the script which does the following: * attempts to ping google.com (or wherever) and gives back a success/failure flag. * attempts to dig/nslookup an address and returns success failure flag. * attempts [whatever other network thing you'd like] and returns success/failure flag. Results can be directed into a file of comma separated values and then loaded into excel for plotting. (or perl can talk directly to some graphing utilities and probably create gifs/pngs directly). A hacky and half-baked solution, but it's what I'd do if I wanted to build detailed network logs.
  • it might be overkill, but have you considered nino? the project description: "NINO is a network management solution to monitor your network, systems and applications: integrated, one tool for all. Features: SNMP, WMI, Service Response performance monitoring, graphs with zoom, topology view, events, reporting."