How do you monitor your ISP to measure availability?

Setup IsItUp to monitor your Internet Service Provider.

IsItUp is a great way to monitor the availability of your Internet Service Provider (ISP) connection - letting you know when it goes down and when it comes back up. Not only is this information important if you have a website you need up or you need to know your email is getting through, but it can also save you money.

Most ISP's will deduct downtime off of your bill if you report the outage. Whether you use DSL, cable, ISDN, or some other connection type, the procedure below will allow you to report on your ISP's availability. 

Precondition - IsItUp should already be installed on your primary IsItUp computer.

Next, you will be setting up an IP device monitor to monitor your Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Step 1 - Research the target IP Address.

You have two options. IsItUp can monitor one of the many publicly available, and pingable, internet servers. It is recommended that you use one of the "time servers" available on the internet for free and capable of processing IsItUp's ping. You can get a list of these IP addresses at http://tf.nist.gov/timefreq/service/time-servers.html or use time-nw.nist.gov. These addresses don't change often and have high availability. When IsItUp's monitor registers a "failure", it will most probably be your ISP. 

However, you may also choose to monitor your ISP directly. You need to research your ISP, or use Traceroute, to identify the IP address of a router on your ISP's network.

Alternatively, you can use both methods at once, setting up two IsItUp device monitors to monitor both.

Step 2 - Setup IP Device Monitor on the Secondary Machine

On IsItUp, select "Setup / IP Monitor" off of the main IsItUp menu.

Next specify the IP Address for the IP device you identified in Step 1:

• Device Name: Enter a unique name you will use to identify the device to be monitored. Spaces and special characters are allowed.
• IP Address: Enter the unique IP address for the device to be monitored. This is the critical piece of information IsItUp needs to monitor the availability of the device.

Follow through the wizard by hitting "Next" to configure notification options.

Step 3 - Let IsItUp monitor your ISP

Sit back and relax. If your ISP goes down, IsItUp will know. If you have selected a notification option, such as a beeper notification (using a modem attached to the IsItUp computer), you'll be notified. When you discover an outage, check the use the Detail Report and Log report to verify where and why the failure occurred. Then use the information when calling your ISP to get a refund for the time it was unavailable. Our experience shows that an effective way to receive the refund on the next months bill is to a) speak to a live technician to report the outage, b) follow-up while the outage is still on-going, c) politely remind them of the policy, the costs to you for the outage, and then request the refund for the period the ISP connection is down.