Internet Connectivity Monitoring

[Giles Coochey]

> 
> On Jan 25, 2008, at 2:54 AM, Giles Coochey wrote:
> 
> > Hi List,
> >
> > As part of our Internet Connectivity monitoring I monitor a set of
> > websites on the Internet from a diverse number of locations
> > geographically.
> >
> > (c) I have to avoid sites which might get pretty annoyed that I'm
> > pulling their homepage once every 10-15 minutes just to see if I'm
> > getting good access.
> 
> This is just generally bad behavior. Statement (c) tells me you
> already know this.
> 

Yes, I have reservations about that; though, thankfully some of our
customers are grateful that we proactively monitor their websites &
their remote VPN endpoints. Unfortunately that doesn't have the
geographical footprint I would like. It would be nice for there to exist
a xx.ping-me.net service... so one could uk.ping-me.net, br.ping-me.net,
sg.ping-me.net, it could even be a paid service if firewalled to just
subscribing IPs.

> > What do you do?
> 
> - verify interface status via SNMP

This won't work with our specific setup, there is some transparent
equipment between our layer-3 equipment and the upstreams, but would be
handled by SNMP TRAP emissions from our equipment anyway.

> - ping all our local internet connected interfaces (redundant to the
> above)
> - verify all our BGP sessions are up and with the proper peers.

I do already do this, with a check BGP plugin, it's good, but doesn't
cover every type of problem and I would like to see a plugin that checks
the number of routes that have been received from each peer,
unfortunately I don't think that's supported via SNMP for our Cisco kit
(It does exist for Juniper though) and I'm against doing any check by
ssh because of the time it takes for such checks to complete.

> - where permitted/possible, ping the remote connected interface

Yes, we do that, though Control Plane Policing gets in the way for most
of our peers. It doesn't provide the End-to-End test I'm trying to find
though.

> - Pay for a colocated/hosted box outside of our network that we can
> monitor to/from. This is useful not only for monitoring but general
> troubleshooting of our and other networks from the outside.
> 

I would really like this, especially as some remote hosting is pretty
cheap, and the bandwidth requirements are pretty low. Perhaps we need to
cost what this would amount to and make an internal proposal.

> - we don't use it but check_cluster(2) could be used to verify that
> all of several internet connections are up and notify appropriately.
> 

Thanks - I will certainly check that one out.

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