Hardware/Software agent experience

[lklawrie]

@outagesio_support

It's probably not a common problem for most folk, but might be a useful statistic to add to your "views"? # of disconnects in a x hour period?

FYI, my manual monitor is running since late yesterday afternoon ("pinging" google.com and facebook.com) and so far it's almost 900 disconnects. google every 5 seconds, facebook every 10.

[lklawrie]

Seems better today (though still pretty constant) -- rained last night so humidity?

Watched one yesterday where the tech just tapped on the ethernet connection on the computer and it failed. But running a new cable solved that, we think. (Not our site)

Still no word from their dispatch.

[lklawrie]

@outagesio_support

Is it improvement if the disconnects only show once per minute? (joking)

[OutagesIO_Support]

@lklawrie Unfortunately not.

As always, we say that OutagesIO is just a tool and other factors must be used to come to some conclusion.

Hard to believe they have not fixed this yet. I suspect this will continue for a long time unless you gather up some neighbors to monitor with.

If you could correlate that others are having problems, you could start posting on their social pages or contact something like the better business bureau to file a case if they won't fix it.

[lklawrie]

@outagesio_support

Fortunately, or unfortunately, their tech support is on my side (they have observed the disconnects) and put in a work order to get it done. Called again yesterday and he switched me to their scheduler -- who said "we will schedule it ASAP".

It may not help that their main office is in Wyoming and we are in Colorado.

I'm about to put it on "Nextdoor" with link to my connectivity monitor to see if others might be having the problem. Also may investigate if local companies might try to solve the problem.

Thanks, as always, for your response. I should have entitled this "venting".

[OutagesIO_Support]

You can share your basic report on your providers Facebook or Twitter or you can also download an image of it from the Light dashboard view that you can then upload into a post.

It's the area that shows 'Breakdown of my Internet problems' and 'When my Internet was down'. You can also download an image of that if you want to share it.

Posting about what you've been experiencing might be a good way to find others using the same provider so you can pool your findings.

Happy to read that you have some help on the way. It's been quite the experience for you.

[lklawrie]

@outagesio_support

Unfortunately, the dashboards show no outages since 6/7 (which was about when they installed to the new tower).

I'm hearing from others though, similar problems. I'm trying to get them either here or to install a connectivity monitor.

I installed a connectivity monitor on another site and !!! no connection problems.

[lklawrie]

@outagesio_support

They came, replaced all the connections and it looked pretty good for about 5 minutes.

Have my little manual monitor running right now.

[OutagesIO_Support]

@lklawrie
Keep in mind, you'll only see 'outages' logged if there are in fact IP outages that the agent can report. If there are no IP outages, then the problem is either something else or the agent is not able to remain online long enough to get the outage and it gets lost.

[lklawrie]

@outagesio_support

Yes, am quite aware of that.

[OutagesIO_Support]

@lklawrie

Hi, has your service gotten any better?
Did the provider find and fix the problem/s?

[lklawrie]

@outagesio_support

They came, replaced all the connections and it looked pretty good for about 5 minutes.

Still getting lots of "connections timed out", "DNS not there", etc.

Living with it at the moment.

Thanks for asking

[lklawrie]

@outagesio_support

Our ultimate solution has been to add a VPN on our devices.

That has majorly solved the connection issues.

How do I tell if the hardware agent I have has "sensors"?

[OutagesIO_Support]

@lklawrie

Happy to hear it's gotten better. It's odd that a VPN would make that difference since those packets still have to travel over the providers network. However, based on what you said above and using a VPN, it sounds like the issue is partly a bad DNS service on your providers part.

[lklawrie]

@outagesio_support

Yes, we played with enabling different DNS but it never really got "ideal".

However after they redid all the connections, one of my "download" scripts became much better -- so I dunno. Our web connections/surfing were not particularly better until the VPN.