Gaps in Pings Graph in Dashboard

[LTMiniard]

I have white gaps in my Pings G\graph on the Dashboard. What are they and why. Also, there is a gap in Heartbeat/Status that looks like the time I got the When my Internet was down 2023-01-17 09:50:39 - Down (192.168.0.1) for 50s (Internal). What does (Internal) mean. See the screen snip. Can I view the graphs in a large scale?

[OutagesIO_Support]

Hi,

Can you expand on what you mean by large scale?

Internal means something on the network was the location of the problem. If the provider for example had some problems that caused short or long outages, the agent, assuming it's not stopped during an outage, will log those events and show them as outages if they are IP related.

Any time you see missing pings or inactive but without outages associated with the same time/date, it means that something else happened, preventing the agent from communicating with OutagesIO.
The heartbeat graph is partly generated by pings and communications with the agent. If pings don't make it or if the agent doesn't communicate for x number of seconds, there will be gaps.
If there was an outage during that time, that will be logged and shown in your events. If there was no outage, then you'll only see a gap.

I mentioned IP related above and that's because depending on how your service is provided, cable, wireless for example, there are other things than only outages that can occur.

This article explains what some other causes can be.

For cable and wireless, the problems are usually signal levels, something that monitoring cannot detect since they aren't IP related. Take a look at that article and let me know if you need additional clarification of something and I'll certainly try to help.

[LTMiniard]

@OutagesIO_Support Thanks for the prompt reply and info. The size of the graph is small and once you have much data on it, it's hard to determine the amount of time the lack of data caused the white gaps. Making a larger graph would help or some magnifier function would be great; kind of like on Amazon where when you roll your cursor over an item and magnified field pops up. Or maybe even better would be to add a list of those breaks, like the "When my Internet was down"

The same goes for the Heartbeat/Status graph.

I'm new to this so I'll try to digest your reply and the link you provided.

[OutagesIO_Support]

Keep in mind that the heartbeat graph isn't something you really use, it's just a quick indicator to know if the agent is communicating.

If you don't see outages on or around the same times as missing pings, it was probably not an IP outages but something else. In terms of outages, there's the bar graph, again, just to show a visual of problems.
In Extended reports, there is also historical information but if your case, it looks like most if not all of the issues you might be experiencing are on the local network.

If you share the agent ID, I can take a look.

[LTMiniard]

@OutagesIO_Support Agent ID is 130013.

[OutagesIO_Support]

130013

Thank you.

An initial look shows that you have had at least six actual IP outages but the rest is not clear.

We reviewed your reports and the truth is we are not sure why there are gaps.
We have something called 'inactive' that are logged when an agent is no longer communicating for a while so we'll try to match those with the gaps.

I would suggest that you just dismiss those for now since they don't seem to indicate a problem at your end.
We will keep an eye on the reports on the back end to see if we can spot something.

The outages however show that there is something on your end that is preventing the agent from communicating.

Take a look at that article, it has a bunch of suggestions from cables to signal levels. Most routers have a dashboard where you can view the signal levels. You should be able to look that info up on how to access that through a search with your make/model.

[OutagesIO_Support]

As an update, there is another thread in the forums where someone has around 30 agents and some random problems were coming up.

After months of testing, we were finally able to isolate the problem and we thought it was fixed.

Additional logs provided to us using the latest version shows that the problem is still there in some form or another.

The agent uses a multithreaded method and it seems that in some cases, one of the threads can spiral out of control causing the agent to miss sending some data now and then.

What's probably happened from looking at your reports is that the agent missed sending pings because the rest of the data looks consistent while the missing pings have no associated missing communications.

In other words, when those pings were missed, the gaps, the agent was still communicating which tells us it failed to send the pings in those times.

When you see gaps, you can always look at your outages to see if there was an outage at the same time. If so, you can discount the missing ping/heartbeat as it makes sense since the agent was not able to communicate. Otherwise, you can attribute the gaps to the problem we are now working on and will release an update once tested.

The biggest challenge with offering online services is that when folks come across problems, they usually prefer to blame the service and tell others how bad it is.

The fact is, if people took the time to let the service know about the problems, they will always do everything possible to fix any problems to keep hard-earned members.

Thank you for pointing this out.

[mschubert]

This still appears to be an issue...

[SBK]

@mschubert
Let me highlight few things before I will dive into your agent's issue.

The idea behind the "pings gaps" is to show in a graph when the pings are not reaching our receivers (our network's servers in charge of this feature).

This "not reaching" can be explained with:

1. a real missing connection to our network meaning the agent becomes inactive, disconnected or abandoned, please check https://support.outagesio.com/topic/55/manage-agents-menu for further explanations of the "offline" status
2. a temporary overload of local (your) or remote (our) network
3. an error in the local agent associated to the multi-threading nature of the agent app
4. a network outage

I do see that your agent has had 3 outages and this reflects only part of the "missing pings"

but I also see that from April 18 your connection was inactive few more times:

In your case I tend to believe it is option 1 but I have opened an internal ticket to be sure we are not in option 3 for the agent 130916.

[OutagesIO_Support]

BTW, if you go to Historical, Pings or Outages, there you can zoom in and out to see more data spread out.