Context
I have been migrated to the Australia’s national broadband network (nbn). Soon after the migration I begun experiencing Internet connectivity issues which my old cable internet service did not have. I got fed up with waking up to find that my ISP-provided nbn router lost connectivity overnight and never regained it, or that it did this in the middle of the day when I needed to work, or when I was not at home and my family was inconvenienced. I decided to figure out a way to “monitor” my Internet connection and get alerted when it went bad. This is so that I had an opportunity to investigate and reboot the router, which was the only way to deal with the issue most of the time.
In this article I share my view on the four connectivity monitors which I named in the previous article and used over a period of time.
Free Internet-based monitoring services I used
(Free service) UptimeRobot (https://uptimerobot.com/)
An UptimeRobot monitor can be configured with the URL of the “responder” and the email address(es) to which to send notification emails. UptimeRobot tests connectivity every 5 minutes in the free service.
One issue I detected with the UptimeRobot is that is occasionally uses outdated cached IP address of the target host, which may have changed and has been updated in the Dynamic DNS service. On these occasions it does not recognise that the host is visible from the Internet because its IP address has changed.
It was the first I chose. I liked the dashboard and notification emails. I want to give them time to sort out the DDNS caching issue. When I complained about the DDNS cachin issue I got a response from the support folks within a day, which for a free service is pretty good in my book.
DDNS caching is still an issue but for the time being I am sticking with this service.
(Free service) StatusCake (https://www.statuscake.com/)
A StatusCake monitor can be configured with the URL of the “responder” and the email addresses to which to send notification emails, and a mobile phone number to which to send text messages. StatusCake tests connectivity every 5 minutes in the free service.
I signed up to this free service because of the IP address caching issue with the UptimeRobot.
Ultimately I found StatusCake somewhat annoying.
Notification emails contain embedded icons which may look nice but add no value and are “broken” if the email client prevents automatic embedded URL following.
Notification emails do not have date/time when “service down” was detected or “service up” was detected. The outage duration is clearly shown in the “service is up” notification, though, which is nice.
In the end there was not enough of an advantage over others to keep it. I deleted the service and the account.
(Free service) Port Monitor (https://www.port-monitor.com)
The free service from Port Monitor can be used to tests connectivity every 60+ seconds. This is more frequent than any of the other monitoring services I tried, where the most frequent test one can configure in the free service is 5 minutes, and is obviously more responsive in detecting “service down” and “service up” events.
The port monitor email notifications are pretty good except they do not provide a pre-calculated “service has been down for x minutes y second” data but rather shows the date/time the service detected that the connectivity was down and date/time the connectivity was up again. It could be that the paid service provides that information in notification emails. I know, it should be no great thing to work out the outage duration from the dates/times but it is extra work and all other services I tried provide this piece of information.
Still, if you want to know roughly to a minute that your service is down and up the port monitor will provide this service.
I am keeping the port monitor watch for the time being.
(“Free for now” service) Monitoshi (http://monitoshi.com/)
Monitoshi offers a service which may cease to be free at some point in time. It does not have a status UI and the monitors are enabled/disabled via API URLs.
I found email notifications to be pretty Spartan. No date/time for when the service down was detected or when the service up was detected, let alone how long the service was down. One could work these out from the email dates/times but that introduces inaccuracies and is more work than I am willing to undertake given that all other free services I tried do this already, and provide management UI and dashboards to boot.
I deleted the monitor I set up.
Summary
I have been running free connectivity monitoring services for a while. Of the 4 I used I am sticking with 2 and I ditched 2 others. The reasons are given in this article.
