[167116] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Is there a method or tool(s) to prove network outages?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matt Palmer)
Sun Dec 1 14:50:46 2013
Date: Mon, 2 Dec 2013 06:50:31 +1100
From: Matt Palmer <mpalmer@hezmatt.org>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Mail-Followup-To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <CACK8u8+yFWmdJ8Km8eG+ubA-8quf4Q9AHrKU0TNJ85_vy0sDrQ@mail.gmail.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
On Sun, Dec 01, 2013 at 05:56:51PM +0100, Notify Me wrote:
> Please I have a very problematic radio link which goes out and back on
> again every few hours.
> The only way I know this is happening is from my gateway device: a Sophos
> UTM that sends email anytime there's been an outage.
>
> The ISP refuses to accept this as outage/instability proof, and I'm
> wondering if there's something I can run behind the gateway UTM that can
> provide output information over time.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the root question to answer before you go
off spending time setting up anything in particular: what *will* the ISP
accept (or be forced to accept) as outage/instability proof? Contracts are
your first line of defence, but it's nigh-on universal that they don't cover
these sorts of situations well enough. So you probably need to have a
discussion, as a follow-on from being told that your UTM's e-mails *aren't*
sufficient, to determine what *is* sufficient.
Once you've got that, only then can you evaluate appropriate methods of
gathering the necessary data to support a claim of an outage. I like the
*idea* of smokeping, but when gathering data on complete service loss (which
was my use case for it as well) I found its methods of collecting and
displaying that data to be very suboptimal and counter-intuitive.
For something small and once-off like this, I'd probably just break out my
text editor and script up something that would collect the relevant data and
process it into the acceptable form.
- Matt
