EMCO Ping Monitor

A while back my Comcast Internet connection and television service started going down every day around 9:00AM and coming back up just before noon. Needless to say this was frustrating.

And Comcast customer service was no help at all. I started asking them for credit for the outages. They would give me a day of service credit for each instance. I would call them up and ask them to put a note in my account. Then once a week I'd call them and ask for a credit.

This got to be a record keeping problem. And I wanted to know whether the problem was outside of my neighborhood, on my Comcast "LAN", just my modem or just my router.

I found EMCO Ping Monitor Free. As its name suggests it's free and monitors via pings.

The free edition allows performing ping monitoring of up to five hosts. I run it on an Ethernet connected system and configure it to monitor:

1. my router
2. my Comcast modem
3. Google DNS (8.8.8.8)
4. comcast.com
5. internationalpaper.com

You configure how often it attempts a ping and how many failed pings should be counted as a network failure.

It will send e-mail notifications of events, failures or return to service.

You can export the stats into csv files.

Nice program. Easily paid for itself.