Long term connection monitoring

Hey,

We are having a few bizarre issues with our broadband connection and I was wondering what the best way would be of monitoring the quality of the connection on a long term basis. Ideally I would like to have something up on screen which would instantly identify any issues e.g. lost packets, higher than average latency, DNS issues, temporary drop out of the connection etc. This would mean if we have issues with the usage of the connection, the guys in the office would instantly know to blame it on the connection and contact the ISP rather than start panicking and running around restarting servers etc.

I am aware of the thinkbroadband connection monitor but that goes inbound - I am looking for a way of having something running on our internal network checking the outbound connection.

One caveat is that our arrangement does not allow outbound pinging which would be the simplest answer.

Any ideas would be gratefully received!
Cheers

Well, the first thing I would do is have all your servers, switches, routers etc. in a secure location so ONLY I.T. staff have access.

Nick

As our testing sends a ping to you and then looks for the response the tbb monitoring will reveal issues in either direction.

what type of connection do you have? and what router are you using?

We don't manage our own IT and the IT staff in the building are useless. We are contractually obliged to use them though as long as we remain in this building.

But then the only way we can have our own servers in the office is by signing a waiver to state that the building's IT company aren't responsible for them, and that we will be fully managing them ourselves.

It's a completely backwards arrangement and it means that you have the managers of the office panicking whenever there's a blip in the service and running around restarting servers. I just want to set up some software (or even write something if necessary) which I can have running on screen in the office so that if the service goes down or is interrupted in any way at all, they can see in a moment's glance whether to blame the equipment in the office (and restart the systems) or blame the broadband connection (and call the IT staff).

Can't be helped for now unfortunately; trust me when I say that I've tried.

Maybe I'm asking in the wrong forum, I've been reading through the boards here and they seem mostly consumer based. Any recommendations for a better place to ask?

Thanks again.

There are cloud services available e.g. http://www.monitor.us/en/website-monitoring

Also there is software available http://www.paessler.com/prtg

Is that what you mean?

Simplistic monitoring of internet access, or full-service monitoring of all services on the server(s) as well?

Obviously there are paid options around, but Nagios is a freebie linux-based option. It monitors all manner of server access and the services on them, and has a variety of notification methods too.

Note that Nagios started out as open-source freebie, but has gradually morphed into a part-open, and part-commercial project. The core still seems to be free and open though.