Ping is a great utility we have previously mentioned in troubleshooting call quality and choosing the best server (or POP). It can also be used to determine whether you lose Internet connectivity. One area where it could be very useful is determining whether your device is losing internet connectivity while idle - as suggested in troubleshooting incoming calls at 7. More precisely, if you are not receiving incoming calls (i.e., your softphone does not "ring"), you might want to check whether your connectivity is interrupted or disappears. The simplest way would be to issue this command in a command prompt: ping -t www.google.com > myconmon.txt That will continuously ping Google (who replies with another packet) and will keep track of packets lost. When Google stops replying you know that the Internet connection is broken or interrupted. The -t switch will ping continuously (otherwise only 4 pings are made). We choose Google servers because they are high availability and very reliable. Finally, we save the output to a text file so that we can find it later because we want to track the connection over time; you can change the name of the file and might want to add a path in front of it so that you can find it later. We can stop the command in Windows by pressing Ctrl + C. At the end (after pressing Ctrl+C) ping will output lost packets as a percentage. If you have any lost packets at all you can safely conclude that your connection was interrupted. Needless to say, the above is a very simple way to monitor the network performance, but it has the advantage of working on most devices. You can customize it or see other customizations in our server choice answer. However, most modern operating systems come with more advanced and easier to use tools for such an endeavor and additional tools are available for free or with a free trial option. In Windows, we have the included "resource monitor" (just search for it) or more advanced solutions for network monitoring such as network performance monitor. There is even a Chrome extension, an obsolete solution, embattled SolarWinds has an IP monitor Free edition, smokeping/mrtg/vaping, cachet w/ monitor, Java program. |
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