Information and Support

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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.

The dev fixed the agent showing extended, but the reports are still not accessible.

I was speaking with the dev a few minutes ago, he logged in using your account and could access all of the historical reports.

Someone is reaching out to you now to see if they can help you personally as this seems to be escalating which is of no value to anyone.

Uninstalling/re-installing will not lose the data has it would already be sent to your reports. The only time you can lose data is if there is an outage in progress and you restart the agent or re-install it, then it will lose that current report.

I am now also having Agent Disconnected issues for no apparent reason. I reinstalled it once and it started working for a few hours,

now it is down again and if I restart or reinstall I lose data. That is not a good start, to having just upgrade my service level.

We have no issues finding out what the problem is, resolving it then restarting your extended from that point.

Might be better if an innocuous statement that things aren't off to a good start is ignored and the issues addressed, instead of a

defensive post that ignores the reported problem and tries to dress down the user!

Nothing was meant that way. Your mention of not getting off to a good start implies that upgrading to a paid level suddenly broke everything for you yet we see a large amount of collected data from before you upgraded. When someone complains about the service, we take it very seriously.

In this case, up until you purchased an extended upgrade for your reports, the agent collected a lof of data clearly showing that your connection is experiencing ongoing problems. Give us an opportunity to help you and please consider that text is never the same as face to face.

As I said, someone has reached out to you. Please consider working with that person so that you and we can resolve what ever is going on.

Thank you.

No problem. It's all fixed now as you said.

I've created an issue for the devs to look into next week.

Thanks for letting us know and for using OutagesIO.

I'm sure I don't have to mention it but it might help someone else that finds this post.

If/when there seems to be something happening with the Internet, please make sure the agent continues to run non stop.

A lot of people see the agent inactive or disaconnected in their dashboard and restart the agent which causes it to lose any actual outage data it might have been tracking.

The agent will always track outages but sometimes it takes some human intervention to decypher the results later. For example, you might still have Internet access but the agent is unable to reach the OutagesIO network. Things of that nature become clearer as data builds up and you start seeing problem points etc.

We'll be happy to help out once you start seeing this kind of information coming in. Having a neightbor or two that are using the same provider monitoring also is an excellent way to confirm provider issues.

Hi,

I'm sorry about this but the new speed test is still in testing. We had started rolling it out but found some problems that we need to solve.

Ping us again about this in a month or so if you've not seen it rolled out or have found any answers.

Hi,

The hardware agents are great because there is nothing to do, simply connect it, power it up and it's on the job monitoring the Internet connection 24/7. And, they are even self updating.

That said, I would strongly suggest looking at the demo, trying the free Windows version, becoming a bit familiar with the service if you haven't done that first to make sure it will give you what you need.

Understood. No, this cannot be accomplished at this time.

Hi again,

Maybe I am not seeing it but did you share your agent ID?

Hi Dean,

Not sure if you know but we've added excel downloads in some of the historical sections for Extended reports.

You announced a few weeks ago that you were stopping logging beyond your provider outages. I’m still getting these.

Have you not done this yet or do I need to upgrade my agents first?

Hi, no we've not removed those yet. It seems some want to know about beyond problems even if it is only informational.

The notice was eventually taken down.

Many of the outages I am seeing by getting emails are not being logged in the dashboard. Is this because they are very

short duration? The ones that are logged are usually in Denver 10 hops away, which is not of any concern.

Do you mean specifically outages or Inactive and maybe Disconnected emails? The emails will specify if the event is only known as Inactive or Disconnected unless there is specifically an IP outage. If there is no IP outage, the emails won't mention outages.

You can control those emails from the Notifications menu if you don't want to know about Inactive.

@kf6pve:

Thanks for checking and appreciate your help.

:)

Hi, I've not seen an update from you so I decided to check and I see that your connection is now showing a lot of outages and all of the stats you were asking about. Please keep in mind that nothing will show up until there are verifiable problems to fill in those graphs.

From what I can see now, most of the problems are with the provider, around 7am and 5:30pm are your peak trouble times. Your speed tests show that speeds are pretty average in terms of a baseline. I hope this is now helping you to better understand what is happening with your connection.

Notice that there is a date range as well. If you've not had any problems in the past day or week for example, some graphs won't show anything until you extended the range.

Keep in mind that you can click on the 'About this page' where ever you see that for help with that particular page any time you see it.

Let us know if you have any questions.

Hi,

It is always possible there is a bug. Microsoft is constantly updating things.

We have two options if this happens again.

1: We can send you a special logging version where once you see the problem, you could send us the log. (preferred)

2: We can have a Windows developer remotely access your PC to do a little testing and hopefully find the problem.

Please let us know if this is still happening and we'll send you a logging version where you can send us the log when this happens again.

Thank you for taking the time to report anything you feel could be wrong so we can have an opportunity to fix it.