Information and Support

@terichardson

Hi Tom,

This is a copy of the email reply we already sent :). Some parts were added after the email being sent.

Let me try to answer some of your questions.

why is having an account with you not enough to be registered in the support forum? -

The www web site is a wordpress information site. The app.outagesio.com web site is a custom application we write and these forums are yet another software type. There is no way to unify accounts across the different platforms though it is something we've been trying to achieve and eventually will.

I had installed an agent back an May and have only been sporadically checking it. It's been disconnected several times, the
last time in June. I went to the dashboard and clicked on a link that I thought would reconnect the agent. The link went away
but I saw no indication that anything had happened.

If the agent was in Disconnected status, then it means it was no longer communicating for some reason. Most of the time, it's because of some other software on the PC that conflicts so the service has to be restarted. There is no way to 'restart' an agent from the dashboard because it's installed on the PC. It has to be restarted on the PC through the services or a reboot.

If your previous agent was extended, we would be happy to extend your new one. I'll pass this on to the dev that takes care of this and you'll see it change as soon as he looks into this.

In terms of documentation, it's been an ongoing struggle trying to find a way to maintain accurate and up to date information and is why we have the 'about this page' links in most of the application pages. Just click on those when you are on a certain page and it will pop open a new tab to the information for that page. We try to keep those up to date so if you find something that doesn't match what you're seeing, by all means, please let us know.

UPDATE since sending;
We see that none of your agents were deleted and the one you paid for is still there but it looks like you may have re-installed onto the same PC which might explain why you are seeing it as Disconnected and it will eventually get removed by the system.
Make sure you only have one agent installed on the PC and we can go from there.

Hi,

Can you try again please. There seemed to have been an issue with the sign up pages. You should be able to complete the sign up now.

Thank you!

Hi,

Other than pings and information about the agent communicating, nothing will show up until there are actual events.

Can you share the agent ID and I'll take a look to make sure everything looks ok.

Thanks again for your assistance. I tried a bunch of different combinations and I finally got it to work. It turns out my OCP profile had a missing last name. After I filled it in I passed the Let Us Know page and can now see the agent page. On the Update Account page, the last name field wasn't marked as required so I left it blank before, and I think that was causing the looping to occur.

Yes, most consumers just take it on the chin, it's less frustrating than fighting for what is right or what you are owed.

Yep, that was the agent in question, and it seems to be working now. Thank you for your help.

Hi,

Yes, that is very strange since the mail services would be the same for both the OCP service and these forums.

We know that all Microsoft services are constantly blocking our emails or sending them to spam. They could care less about smaller companies as we have tried to contact them and to work with them on countless occasions yet they keep doing this. It is an unjust action to our members because we absolutely do not spam. Every single email we send out even includes an unsubscribe and all correct DNS and other measures.

We are very aware that a blacklisting service called UCEPROTECTL3 keeps putting entire ASN's in their blacklist and that no one seems to have been able to do much about this yet. What happens is that if one single mail server does something that is considered spam, this service blacklists not only this server but the entire IP range that this server is part of which effectively blocks countless other mail servers. Then they request payment to be removed.

We suspect that companies like Microsoft owned mail services are using this service and so we and countless other mail servers and up with problems that affect our members.

By the way, one other thing that keeps happening is people sign up to the service and sometimes when they leave it, rather than disabling their notifications, they flag them as spam with their mail service which effectively prevents others from getting their notifications too.

I'm sorry that this is happening and we do not seem to have any control over it. Only members of those services can change things by complaining to their mail providers. All I can suggest is that you send an email to noreply@outagesio.com from your mail service so that it will whitelist the domain.

Can you give that a try and we'll go from there.

Hi,

Perhaps it was yourself that asked about this via email and you were given the price of $40.00 which was a mistake.

Asking the right person gave a price of $15.00 to the Phillipines.

We don't have pricing for some countries because the shipping costs are sometimes too high and most people aren't interested.

If you would like to order, please reply to the person that sent you that email and I'm sure they will work with you.

Thank you for using OutagesIO.

Hi,

I'm told that it was accidentally disabled for Extended reports but it's back on now.

Thanks for bringing it to our attention.

LOL, I was just about to say…

Glad you got it running :).

Hi,

I asked the developers about tihs and the problem is the help/information doesn't show that the scan only runs from port 1 to 1024.

We tested allowing a much larger range of ports and the problem was that when there are a large number of scans and ports, they take much too long to run. Also, most standard ports are under 1024.

I have created a new issue to not only add this mention but also to see if there is anything else we might be able to to in order to raise that port limit.

NOTICE: I think a moderator accidentally edited your last comment instead of replying. To fix this, I am copying their reply into this new comment.

It's good to hear that things have improved some. One issue we see regularly is that providers will make repairs, everything seems to work nicely for a while then slowly degrades again. This seems to be a common thread.

However, I'm now 5 days in and have started to get Outage speed tests showing (Black bars on the graph) yet there is no outage

shown on the outages graph or the "why my internet was down" list in light view.

Can anyone tell me why this might be?

This is a bug in the speed testing algorithm. There is a condition where the agent thinks there is a problem such as latency or a slow down which triggers these speed tests. The black bar is only supposed to show up after an outage.

The idea behind running the speed test after an outage is that over time, it might show a trend. It's not all that useful since speeds are constantly changing and typically, right after an outage, speeds are way back up at least for a while.

The reports are all about trends, it's what you see over longer periods of time but when you don't see an outage yet see the black bars, that's a bug we've been trying to iron out.

Got an email with this subject.

Agent number is not shown in my agents – I believe it refers to a software agent that I removed a long time ago.

But not sure how to tell. Says it will be removed in 30 days.

Yes, it would mean there is an old report being removed. I'll mention this to development because as you mention, you had deleted the agent, therefore, should not have received a notice about it. The notice is for those who have not deleted and may want to re-install it.

Hardware agent has been installed and working except it didn't report an outage that we had (about 20 minutes) a few days ago

There are many conditions which can cause loss of Internet access which aren't actually IP outages.

Meaning, not all loss of Internet access are TCP/IP AKA routing based problems but other things.

OutagesIO is built to mainly monitor IP outages with your provider but often, it's what you don't see that tells the story.

If you don't see IP based outages (logged outages in your reports) but you do experience loss of Internet access or obviously low speeds, the first step is to check everything in your own location to make sure nothing is failing such as a cable, dust in Ethernet connectors, the most basic things.

What OutagesIO cannot monitor are signal levels with cable and wireless providers/devices for example but when we're seeing loss of Internet access without outages, that's what is telling us that there are other problems to dig into or ask the provider about.

One great method to use is to find some neighbors that might use the service too. This way, you can compare and correlate your reported loss of Internet access and other findings so that even mystery problems become more obvious.

That said, we are working on another report that will show specifically non outage (IP) based loss of Internet access to help in exactly these situations.