Alerting when site is unreachable

Question

I'd like to have PingPlotter notify me when my web site has network problems and becomes unreachable. Is that possible?

Solution

Absolutely! You can set up a PingPlotter (or MultiPing) alert to 'watch' a specific target and tell you if the conditions get bad enough to warn you about.

The first thing to do is to create the alert. Go to Edit -> Alerts, then use the 'New' button to create a new alert.

Enter a useful name (like 'Site is down!'), and then set up the following conditions:
Samples to examine: 5
Alert when 5 or more samples is over 9999 ms.
If you're using PingPlotter Pro, you'll also want to use the default method of 'Latency and Packet Loss'.

This combination of settings will look back at the last 5 samples collected, and if they're all lost (> 9999ms is a lost packet), then the alert will fire. If only 4 out of 5 are lost, it will not fire.

There are a bunch of other variations you can do with these settings. If you want to get notified whenever any packet is lost, then set 'Samples to examine' to 1, and 'Alert when ... samples' to 1. If you want to notify when 10% of the last 10 samples is lost, then set this to look at 10 samples and notify if 1 sample exceeds 9999.

Once you've set up the alert, you'll need to set up an alert event/action, tie the alert to the target you want alerted for, and then have PingPlotter start tracing to that target. We have more documentation on how to do those steps:

• Alert setup, including alert event details.
• Tie an alert to a target (and troubleshooting problems).
• Our Getting Started Guide (look at the 'Getting Notified of a Network Problem' section).