<Free Ping services that test your servers Availability from the Internet>

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1

Hey folks,

                I had a situation recently that our network went down
and our Network Monitoring software did not notify us that the network
was down because the internet connection went down. We had a problem
with our carrier where they messed up on our /23(where our Network
Monitoring software resides), when they did a maintenance. What
transpired is our /23 was no longer routing to us. Is there a free ping
internet service, or something that we can pay a company that just sends
a ping to devices? If they fail to respond, then an email is sent to
us? Thank you folks.

M.A.R

Senior Network Engineer

2

I generally recommend Pingdom (http://www.pingdom.com/). We used them at my
last employer and they caught a few outages that we didn't even know about.

3

You could just build a nagios server at your house and use that for free. Not really "enterprise-level", but if you're just looking for a last ditch alert it should work just fine.

-Richard

4

Michael Ruiz wrote:

Hey folks,

                I had a situation recently that our network went down
and our Network Monitoring software did not notify us that the network
was down because the internet connection went down. We had a problem
with our carrier where they messed up on our /23(where our Network
Monitoring software resides), when they did a maintenance. What
transpired is our /23 was no longer routing to us. Is there a free ping
internet service, or something that we can pay a company that just sends
a ping to devices? If they fail to respond, then an email is sent to
us? Thank you folks.

M.A.R

Senior Network Engineer

Let me ask this question from a different angle. Did you NMS notice the
issue? If so, does your software require Internet to notify you?

I use just a simple modem(remember those?<GRIN>), a pots line and qpage
to send 'out of band' notifications.

Lyle Giese
LCR Computer Services, Inc.

5

Ah yes, the frequently overlooked "internet is required to notify when
the internet is broken" problem. I use text-to-speech with Asterisk on a
POTS line or PRI. Killing landlines is the cool thing to do these days,
but if IP breaks that's when a POTS line still wins.

~Seth

6

Webmetrics provides such a service (full disclosure I used to work for these guys)...

http://www.webmetrics.com/

Stefan Fouant

7

An alternative would be Gomez GPN .. however all these are a bit of
overkill for what you specifically need (uptime) - pingdom does very
well for that.