Information and Support

Did you find the email?

Hi Ed. Yes. I can see your messages now here.

Hi,

Sorry for not responding. Every now and then, we don't get notifications for posts of they get lost in too many emails.

So the first thing would be to understand what are outages and disconnections. Here are some links that can help.

All can be found in this category;
https://support.outagesio.com/category/7/articles-and-services-related-posts

https://support.outagesio.com/topic/12/about-internet-outages-alerts-and-agent-statuses

https://support.outagesio.com/topic/120/about-inactive-excessive-outages-and-notifications

https://support.outagesio.com/topic/112/important-cable-and-wireless-internet-services

There are two reasons that there could be down time, IP outages and/or disconnections. IP outages are the easiest one because there is always a report.

If the agent cannot make a complete connection to a destination, it will instantly go into tracking mode. This means that there are two things that can happen.

So long as the agent was not disrupted, it will send an outage report if there was in fact an IP outage and/or it will send an Inactive if MIA for at least 30 seconds and eventually a Disconnection notice if it is MIA for at least 30 minutes.

Both of these can be disregarded if an IP outage comes in during that same time.

On the OutagesIO side, Inactive/Disconnected notifications will be set if you have those enabled as well as an outage notification if you also have that enabled. This is why you would get multiple notifications that could be confusing unless you are aware of why those are sent.

The agent will always log an IP outage since there is something to log but if it's just disconnections, there is nothing that can be logged, based on the articles above.

Note also that like all IP monitoring, software alone cannot always be 100% sure, it takes human eyes to take a deeper look. Data from any monitoring tool is used along with other factors to determine what the problems might be.

IP routes could change any moment so one ping to something remote might change routes while another might not.

However, in the case of OutagesIO, the point is to get some idea of problems on the LaN but mainly it is to monitor the ISP/Provider.

All data beyond the provider is for information only and cannot be used in any way since the only entity you could go after for problems is the local ISP.

The upper tier carriers rarely if ever respond to complaints other than the ISPs they provide services to. It would be practically impossible to get in touch with someone that will care enough to look into it.

The provider however can be motivated to do better, especially when there is correlating data from other nearby locations using OutagesIO for example that are all seeing similar problems.

So again, the key is using OutagesIO as part of your tools. It automates as much as possible to help you find potential problems. A blip here and there does not always indicate a problem, it's just the nature of Internet connectivity.

Let me know if this helps at all.

You're welcome. Thanks for using the service and please, pass the word on. We live by word of mouth since it's impossible to outbid deep pocket ISPs and outages sites that would rather you don't find a service like ours.

The problem with using or posting IPs is that they can and do change so posting those publicly ends up being stale information at some point that some people would use only to find that nothing works.

That said, let me explain how the pings work.

The pings are set from source to destination. It doesn't matter what the destination is so long as it's consistent.

The agent is not providing you pings to anything specific or meaningful to the user, it's using those to recognize if ping times are changing.

The agent runs a set of pings, averaging those every minute then sending them to the network, mostly used as a visual piece of data showing when events may or did happen.

The agent algorithm monitors for changes from what it has last re-calculated as average to x percentage difference. If that difference appears to be higher than average, then this triggers other tests such as a short speed test which can in turn trigger a full speed test if enabled.

The point of the service is not to monitor the Internet but the provider so we're just using a target that is beyond the provider as a destination.

Now, on the other hand, if you were a business customer with us, and you needed certain custom things specific to your environment, we would work with you for what ever you need because we would be communicating regularly so if we had to make changes and those could affect you, we would have a contact person to reach out to or that would know about the changes.

Hope this helps to explain a little better why providing IPs would not work well.

Hi,

If this has not been solved yet, we can get your agent/s back up within a few minutes. Please see this post.
https://support.outagesio.com/topic/295/urgent-yellow-hardware-agent-owners/4

BTW, what did it cost you to send those agents back so we can include that in the refund.

Sorry for not answering to this before! :-(
Please share your agent ID so I can take a look at it

Hi,

Yes, absolutely. This article explains all of the steps on how to monitor your Internet using our Linux based agent either stand alone or as a service.

The script will also auto download the newest version when it is restarted which is why we suggest you auto restart it now and then.

https://www.outagesio.com/monitor-your-internet-with-linux-desktop-or-server/

Thanks for your help in testing. We have gone ahead and released the new version for all platforms.

Please upgrade at will and let us know if you see any problems.

Windows users use the Manage/Re-Install and Linux/Dev board users can simply kill and restart their scripts.

Hi,

There are disconnections, meaning, the agent could not reach our network for some reason or another.
The agent will always log outages that it can determine but when you see these without outages as well, it means something else, bad cable, low signal level if cable/WiFi, something with the provider, or anything but an actual outage.

Hi,

Those refurbs come up now and then but we no longer have any at the moment sorry.

This question just happened to come in as we were working on some email related things. Adding this took all of a few minutes and is already in production.

Thank you for the suggestion.

Thanks for the update. Glad it's working now.

Now it is ok
It seems that the NTP was not working correctly on your device but I need more time to evaluate all the things I have been testing.
The HW agent is now with the latest firmware which I know is stable.
Sorry again for the misunderstanding

Thanks for clarifying.

That method evolved because many members would never disable their emails when leaving the service and we found our domain getting blacklisted.

At one point, we didn't have such a limitation so the network could end up sending hundreds upon hundreds of emails to a mail service. It didn't take long before we got blacklisted which affected any other members using the same mail services.

Instead, we decided that since Inactive is something that someone should look into quickly if they are interested in such notifications, it made no sense to keep sending emails about the same thing.

This also helped solve being blacklisted and affecting other members.

Inactive notifications aren't outages, they aren't something the agent is able to detect, such as signal loss on coax and wireless based services. It's more of a notice that something is preventing the agent from communicating with the OutagesIO network.

https://support.outagesio.com/topic/12/about-internet-outages-alerts-and-agent-statuses/1

Hope this helps.

@brendan-techdoz said in Ordered subscription for the wrong agent:

130090

Hi,

Not a problem, the subscription was moved to the other agent for you.

Thanks for using OutagesIO.

And now we see it Inactive. It it stays this way for 29+ minutes, it will then change to Disconnected status.

Last communicated on 2023-02-09 13:02:30.