How to monitor my connection continuity within 24 hours

Question

I have a bad ISP, and my internet cuts off for like 10 seconds every 2 hours or so and return. According to my ISP it's fixed, but they've been saying that for weeks now.

My question is, is there a way to monitor if my internet is being cut off for a duration of 24 hours?

I tried ping, but it's hardly reliable and I will have to set on front of the pc to keep track.

Is there a software that can monitor the continuity of my internet connection for 24 hours straight?

Your help would be highly appreciated on the matter.

Thank you for taking the time in reading this.

Answer 1

You mentioned using ping, and you're absolutely right, only you don't need to stare at your screen and wait for connectivity issues. Send the output of ping to a file, and Ctrl+C to stop pinging when you feel enough time has passed.

ping 8.8.8.8 > log.txt

8.8.8.8 is Google's public DNS. The ping command will write to log.txt in whatever your current working directory is.

Alternatively, here is a quick-and-dirty way to incorporate time stamps with each ping using Powershell, assuming you're using a version of Windows with PowerShell. When you break and decide to run this again later, it will append to your log file.

    $hostToPing = '8.8.8.8'
    $logPath = "C:\Users\username\Desktop\temp\pinglog.txt"
    $alwaysTrue = 1


while($alwaysTrue -eq "1")
{

        # refresh the timestamp before each ping attempt
        $theTime = Get-Date -format g

        # refresh the ping variable
        $result = ping $hostToPing -n 1

                if ($result -like '*reply*')
                {
                    Write-Output "$theTime - pass - connection to $hostToPing is up" | Out-File $logPath -append
                }
                else
                {
                    Write-Output "$theTime - fail - connection to $hostToPing is down" | Out-File $logPath -append
                }

        Sleep 1
        echo ' '

}

Answer 2

Here is what I have been doing to track the continuity of 2 computers on campus. This is all done in a .bat file without powershell. The first 3 lines just set the prompt so I'm not looking a the long path to the file. Then I overwrite the file pingtest.txt in the same folder as the .bat (.\pingtest.txt, .\ means current folder). The ping -n 1 sends 1 ping and >> appends the output to the bottom of the file as well as the current time %time%. The timeout /t 5 > nul is a wait in seconds, then it restarts.

When you have been watching for as long as you want. Close the cmd window and search the .txt for 100 or timed and it will show you all pings that had 100% loss or timed out.

@echo off
prompt timer$F > nul
@echo on

echo Tracking starts at %time% > .\pingtest.txt

@echo off 

:start

ping -n 1 address1 >> .\pingtest.txt
echo %time% >> .\pingtest.txt

ping -n 1 address2 >> .\pingtest.txt
echo %time% >> .\pingtest.txt

timeout /t 5 > nul

goto :start

Answer 3

I was reading an article on Ars Technica the other day where they were lambasting Comcast for being a crappy ISP. Someone came up with a Raspberry Pi that tweets out their speed if it's substantially less than advertised.

In the commentary of the article, someone mentioned SmokePing (DSL Reports has an FAQ too). I will be looking into this software, and it sounds like you might want to as well. It looks like it's a cloud service reaching out to your network, but based on the comment, I thought it was something you could set up locally to see outbound metrics.

Answer 4

Thank you all for taking the time to answer my question, I'm sorry for the late reply, it's due to my very bad ISP.

I went ahead and saved the ping test to a text file as suggested by @root, and that worked great.

It turns out it's cutting even more often than I thought, so just switched to another ISP :)

Again thank you all for taking the time answering my question.