Monitor my ISP performance

A simple program you can leave running is NetMonitor by Kissco (free). I realize there are more powerful applications out there to do this such as NetMedic, it just depends on the level of information you are needing.
Kissco Software
29 Hubble
Irvine, CA 92618
US
Phone: 949-727-3233
Web: http://www.kissco.com

Hi,

Another thing you can do is to use tracert to determine the links that are causing the slowdowns.

Typing...

tracert

at the command prompt gives you that information. For example...

E:\Documents and Settings\Tim Medhurst>tracert www.google.com

Tracing route to www.google.com [216.239.35.101]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms GWSERV [192.168.0.1]
2 26 ms 22 ms 19 ms 172.31.18.24
3 24 ms 22 ms 23 ms 172.31.52.24
4 23 ms 22 ms 23 ms CPE-61-9-207-29.nsw.bigpond.net.au [61.9.207.29]

5 25 ms 22 ms 23 ms kent-matrix-r01.nsw.ipm.bigpond.com [203.18.76.7
1]
6 23 ms 22 ms 22 ms GigabitEthernet5-0-0.ken8.Sydney.telstra.net [13
9.130.7.13]
7 23 ms 22 ms 23 ms GigabitEthernet3-0.ken-core4.Sydney.telstra.net
[203.50.12.153]
8 24 ms 23 ms 22 ms Pos2-0.pad-core4.Sydney.telstra.net [203.50.6.22
]
9 23 ms 22 ms 23 ms GigabitEthernet0-0.syd-core01.Sydney.net.reach.c
om [203.50.13.242]
10 211 ms 211 ms 211 ms 202.84.143.5
11 210 ms 211 ms 211 ms i-13-0.paix-core01.PaloAlto.net.reach.com [202.8
4.251.49]
12 211 ms 211 ms 212 ms 611.ge13-0.mpr2.pao1.us.mfnx.net [209.249.0.177]

13 213 ms 212 ms 210 ms pos2-0.mpr1.pao1.us.mfnx.net [208.184.232.181]
14 211 ms 211 ms 211 ms so-3-2-0.cr1.sjc3.us.mfnx.net [208.184.232.177]

15 212 ms 211 ms 211 ms pos0-0.er2a.sjc3.us.mfnx.net [208.185.175.190]
16 213 ms 213 ms 214 ms sjni1-gige-1-1.google.com [64.124.78.29]
17 214 ms 215 ms 214 ms sjbi1-1-1.net.google.com [216.239.47.162]
18 212 ms 215 ms 215 ms www.google.com [216.239.35.101]

Trace complete.

(continued)

I read about NetMonitor but appear to be for home users (or single user). I want on overview about WAN performance not only for my workstation.
I miss to say that the network architecture is based on switches (star topography).

Several possible issues (if your problem is intermitant):

1. Your ISP may have limited bandwidth. If that bandwidth gets bogged down, all of your ISP's customers would be affected. See if you can find other of your ISP's customers and compare notes.
2. If there are times when you can only access websites inside your country but not outside, that is probably not even your ISP's problem unless they are the only ISP in your country. That may be a nissue with the main nodethat funnels Internet traffic from your country elsewhere.
3. Sometimes the Internet is slow. If a major continental node is having problems or outages, that means other nodes will have greatly increased traffic to route, which can slow down everybody.
4. If yourely on radio communications to connect to your ISP (as opposed to a hard-wired connction), yes, that can create a whole other set of problems. If your modem is operating at 3GHz, you are definitely operating in the line-of-site frequency range. If there are obstructions between you and your ISP, your signal quality can be affected. Electrical storms can definitely affect signal quality. Other transmitters that operate at or near your frequency can affect signal quality, especially if they are pumping out more power. Consider things like moving your antenna to a more advantageous location, or getting a modem with a more powerful transmitter (if they exist and are allowed).

Other things to check:
Look for patterns - slow-downs occur during certain times of day or certain days of the week, or in certain types of weather.
When slow-downs occur, try running tracert to determine where the bottlenecks might be.
If any of your connection equipment was provided/configured by your ISP, try and get their tech support to verify that the equipment is working properly.
(continued)

TimTheToolMan
That is I'm doing for the moment. But not all the time I can check. I scheduled the task and also I create a log file but am hard to read/check this log. In addition a problem can be occur for an half hour and if in this time I don'tcheck, I missed the event.

Tim Walsh
-About third comments. How many times in a month you had have similar problems?
-The communication equipment was verified and reconfigured but I'm not sure about the performance of this equipment. I will try to change with other model.

Check out MRTG:
http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/webtools/mrtg/

I think it is what you need. It measures bandwidth usage vs capacity and graphs it over different time elements.

hope this helps

One of my favorite network monitoring tools is MRTG (www.mrtg.org). It's open source and can pick up SNMP stats from any SNMP based equipment. It outputs daily, weekly, monthly and yearly graphs. It's a great tool to monitor router stats over time.

Another great tool is Big Brother (www.bb4.com). Also open source, this tool does more real-time monitoring as well a keeping some history. It can alert you when a service goes down or comes back up.

Both of these tools run under either Windows NT or UNIX/Linux.

Tony Fardella

I too worked in an ISP , in situations like this we give an MRTG report every week from our side showing the bandwidth usage to the customer. And also u can monitor the usage using the same program at your network. So ask ur ISP to give a MRTG report on periodical basis and compare both the reports.
The MRTG report from the ISP will suggest u whether ur radio communication modem is good enough & provides good Qos.

Thanks,
Kias

Hi,

We are using a 256 wireless broadband in the office. For almost a month, i was tasked to monitor the speed and efficiency of this connection before we sign a contract with the isp. I recommend http://www.dslreports.com for monitoring and testing. Once you have registered for a login name and password, they have a really nice set of tools, namely: Line packet loss testing, Speed tests, even tweak tests to see if your server is optimized for your bandwidth. These services are free and they keep a history and summary of tests and tools you have done on DSLreports. If you are willing to pay, they have a 24x7 line monitoring service in which they ping your ip address once every 10 minutes, keep the records and generate packet loss graphs and they send you weekly emails of historical data.

rcaluste

Hi,

re: Missing the event... so check every 5 mins rather than hourly? Its not a great load you're putting on the network by doing this. You could check every minute if you wanted.

re: Analysis, yes its a bit of work to summarise the data but at least you'll only be doing it once (I assume from your question), so a bit of work at analysis time would probably be the same as finding, installing and configuring a tool to do the same. Besides, tracert really does give you all the data you need to do this analysis...

Had you considered simply dropping the logs into Excel and sorting once by link and again by response time? If you have Excel, of course...

That would give you the info you need, plus Excel will do graphs of "problem links" simply by selecting the response times for the problem link and building the graph. Excel is good at that...

There IS one extra thing that you'd have to do, though. You'd need to prefix every tracert line in the log with the date and time. Excel would do most of that work for you, though.

I looked at a couple of the links suggested by others and they didn't really look suitable - either LAN monitoring or "its working/its not working" monitoring. Neither really suits what you seem to need. You need numbers to make a better informed decision...

...so if you're really not happy with using tracert then I'll see if I can find you a tool.

Cheers,
Tim.

TimTheToolMan
Yes I can do that but what is your opinion about additional traffic if I put tracert to work at every 5 minutes?
MRTG don?t charge connection (no additional traffic).
I don?t say that this is not an option, I want only your opinion.