Information and Support

Yes, ping times are affected by which hops they flow through. We always wanted a more 'real world' result for pings so wanted those to go through many switches getting to our network. We just needed a reliable destination. It didn't matter where or what, so long as the agents algorithm was able to build up averages from which it would recognize latency changes.

We've tested using closer (to the agent) destinations but it's never 'real world' like. We keep testing this to see how we can improve it.

Thanks very much for bringing this up. We're looking into the other things too.

Hi, are you able to ping the tpw servers now?
Target hosts must always be up.
As for ping times, not sure yet, might have been traffic being rerouted.

There was in fact a problem with that which we are also investigating.

Yes sorry, I replied to Ed's post in error. I was tired. You can disregard that. Sorry for the confusion.

By the way, only our dedicated hardware agents are rebooted. On Windows, the service restarts itself nightly only. This is because PCs can also be in use by people and we would not want them to lose any work they were doing.

Retracted. Accidentally replies to Ed :)

BTW, I assume you noticed that the missing notifications was solved right after you brought it up so again, thanks for bringing that up.

At the moment, it seems to be something on your end but what, we cannot tell from here. Quite challenging. By gaining ssh access into it, where the problem is, we would have a better chance to find out what's going on.

No need to send it back, there is nothing wrong with the agent. You might notice it seems to be behaving a bit better already.
We continue testing small changes to see if those affect your agent and the odd behavior.

You might notice it rebooting now and then and if you do, that's us testing incremental changes because we don't want to affect all of the other working agents.

We do not see these things with other agents so what ever is happening, it is specific to your location or better said, something on your network.

We are still investigating and making some progress which we'll share.

For ssh access, you'd have to look up what ever firewall you are using and create a rule that allows a remote IP to a LAN device (port forwarding).

Your other option would be to send it back so we can look at it.

The problem is that your ISP could be having certain problems but it would not explain the behavior we're seeing from your agent. From all we can tell, the programs are running correctly but something keeps blocking the monitoring program for long periods of time.

Since both programs communicate with the same remote networks, then both should stop communicating if it was a communications issue but only one does.

It's quite weird which is why gaining access to the device might give us a better understanding of what is going on.

Update.

Day two of looking into this. We spent a large portion of the day trying to understand why this is happening to your agent only.

There is barely a pattern but we can tell that the main program stops communicating after a while and eventually, just comes back. In the meantime, another program keeps communicating but that one does not monitor the Internet.

Your agent is running the same firmware as all the others are and the same agent version yet yours has this odd problem of the main program not communicating. That said, while it has the same version, it could still be a slightly bit different one that somehow was flashed on yours by mistake.

One thing that came up. Are you using the power supply that came with the agent or another one?

Second, is there any chance you can give us remote ssh access to this agent. You can lock it down to one of our IPs of course but being able to look on the agent itself might show us something we simply cannot see from remote.

If ssh is possible, Ed would get into a chat with you tomorrow to get the into and would then take a look.

Just so you know, we are still monitoring this. Since the problem is not clear, we're trying tests which take a while to confirm.

For example, we've updated your agent to the newest version that is not released yet to see if that might help and other things.

We do see that the agent gets a fair number of disconnections which are not IP outages.

Still on this.

The setup is unrelated to the problems you've reported. Once we've resolved those issues, we can try to help with what you're seeing.

Hi,

Here is an update.

Thankfully, you took the time to report what you were seeing and sure enough, we've found some bugs that need attention.

First, we found a bug that started in mid December causing notifications to never go out but only for certain agents. Hard to believe that no one bothered to take the time to let us know about that or didn't notice but it should be fixed now. If it's not, at least with a bit more feedback, it'll get resolved.

Second, there is indeed an odd problem going on with these new agents and again, not all of them but yours is affected. While it does reboot nightly as it should, it is also being sent a command that causes the monitoring code to keep running but the status to show Rebooting.

We worked on this all of last night trying to find out where this is coming from, what is sending it and why but didn't find anything. We stopped by leaving additional logging in place to get some leads which I see we did capture overnight.

The investigating will continue in an hour or so and I'll update this as we find or solve it.

If you see anything unusual that you've not reported, please feel free to mention it.

You mentioned seeing the status being 'rebooting' for a long time. Can you give us any more details about this?

The normal reboot is in the middle of the night and only takes 30 seconds or so. We do this to make sure there are no memory bleeds but also to have a chance to recover agents if something ever goes wrong.

As for the notifications not being sent, we just noticed that too since your agent was Inactive a moment ago. We see your settings are set to get those.

Still digging into this because we want to solve problems so again, thanks for taking the time to let us know.

Hi,

Thanks for reporting the problem.

First, there are no setup instructions needed, you just connect it to the LAN port and power. Once online, you activate it into your account which you have so you're fine on all of that. Activating basically just means telling OutagesIO that this is your agent, it goes into your account/inventory.

Correct, the agent should not be rebooting or showing rebooting all the time. This means that it is not fully communicating so we'll have to look into that with you to find the cause.

The fact that it's not sending a response to OutagesIO to confirm it's done rebooting and back online is what tells me that.

I'll contact our lead developer, Ed, about this to see if he can help you.

On the outages not being reported, what you explained is the correct behavior. Pulling a cable would cause the agent status to go Inactive, eventually Disconnected but since there was no actual IP outage, it would not send anything.
You can however set your notifications to be notified if the agent becomes Inactive or Disconnected.

Assuming it was not power cycled, and assuming there was an actual IP outage, it would send that report once it comes back online.

Here are a few things that can help explain how statuses, disconnections and outages are handled. Ed will respond as soon as he can.

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

https://support.outagesio.com/topic/12/about-internet-outages-alerts-and-agent-statuses
We can tell when we have something problematic because we would get a lot of complaints.

Agents are manually prepared and fully tested before they are shipped. I'm sure there is nothing wrong with the agent itself but something is causing a problem which we need to dig into.

We appreciate when people take the time to let us know about problems because our number one priority is always making sure the service works. We spend too much time of our lives on this service to offer it broken so are always eager to fix any problems that come up.

Did you find the email?

Hi,

When an agent is created, an email is sent out with that information. Please check your spam box for that email.
The problem is that people no longer using the service sometimes flag emails as spam instead of just logging in and disabling them which affects others.

Hi,

If there is personal information involved that you don't want to share in public, you can contact us using the 'Reach out to us form on www.outagesio.com.

Otherwise, you're welcome to post in this forum which is for feedback.

https://support.outagesio.com/category/11/feedback-about-outagesio

Great tip for others. Thanks for sharing.

We do plan on adding SMS, it's in our long list of things to do :).

Hi and welcome to OutagesIO.

You'll notice your agent is in pre-staging status.
Pre-staging status means the agent is ready to be licensed using a subscription. Once you've done that all of the features will be enabled rather than the free reports showing now.

Pre-staging is to ensure that your agent is ready to license so that you're not paying for an agent that is not communicating properly yet.

SMS is for Enterprise members but it will be added for OutagesIO members as well, just not sure about when right now.

Hope this helps.

BTW, be sure to connect the wired Ethernet back to the LAN port on the agent then power cycle it again.

We disabled wi-fi for now to see if that will get your agent back up as a first step. Then we can figure out why the wi-fi is not working.

We doubled checked agents here and all work so what ever the problem is, it's something small.

Timing :). Ed will be back in around two hours.
If it's 131162 , I still see it in status rebooting.
It did communicate then stopped seconds later.

When Ed is back, he will try to get into a live chat with you so that you can solve this together since working in real time together will help more than messaging/posts.

Check it now, it should be fine.