Seeking Recommendations for a Simple Network Diagnostics Device or Setup

[Leth96]

I want a device or setup that can help me monitor the uptime of different aspects of my network.

What I'm aiming for is an easy-to-read dashboard that allows me to track the percentage uptime of the following:

1. Direct Cable Connection: The uptime of my internet connection straight from the cable provider.
2. Router Ethernet Port: The uptime of my router's wired ethernet connection.
3. Router Wi-Fi Networks: The uptime of my router's Wi-Fi networks, preferably broken down by network (e.g., Network A and Network B).

Ideally, I'd like to see something like this:

"For the last 7 days, the Ethernet via the fiber box has had 100% uptime, the Ethernet via the router has had 100% uptime, and internet via Router Wi-Fi Network A has had 98% uptime, while Network B has had 98% uptime."

I'm currently using ASUS routers, and I'm open to suggestions for a physical device that can connect to all three sources and provide this data. My budget is around $150 or less, so I'm hoping for something affordable.

Additionally, if anyone knows of a way to set up something similar using a Raspberry Pi or any other smart home device, I'm all ears. I'm just looking for a simple way to monitor the reliability of my network connections.

Any recommendations or insights you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

[tgl]

I want a device or setup that can help me monitor the uptime of different aspects of my network.

You can get arbitrarily complicated on that, but what I've done for the last year or so is to run a simple background script on my essentially-always-up main server that constantly pings selected other machines around the premises, as well as my ISP's gateway machine. I set it up to issue one ping about every 6 seconds to each target, but of course you could use some other interval depending on your appetite for detail vs. overhead. I save the ping outputs into log files and wrote a couple of trivial scripts to analyze those logs. This required $0 hardware investment and maybe a couple hours of time. If you don't have a suitable always-up server, you could get a Raspberry Pi or or the like to run the monitoring script.

If you want something more whiz-bang, my next recommendation would be Nagios. Although it's free open source, the learning curve to get it configured is pretty steep, to the point where getting it going might take more time than setting up the sort of ad-hoc system I just described.

 

[drinkingbird]

I want a device or setup that can help me monitor the uptime of different aspects of my network.

What I'm aiming for is an easy-to-read dashboard that allows me to track the percentage uptime of the following:

1. Direct Cable Connection: The uptime of my internet connection straight from the cable provider.
2. Router Ethernet Port: The uptime of my router's wired ethernet connection.
3. Router Wi-Fi Networks: The uptime of my router's Wi-Fi networks, preferably broken down by network (e.g., Network A and Network B).

Ideally, I'd like to see something like this:

"For the last 7 days, the Ethernet via the fiber box has had 100% uptime, the Ethernet via the router has had 100% uptime, and internet via Router Wi-Fi Network A has had 98% uptime, while Network B has had 98% uptime."

I'm currently using ASUS routers, and I'm open to suggestions for a physical device that can connect to all three sources and provide this data. My budget is around $150 or less, so I'm hoping for something affordable.

Additionally, if anyone knows of a way to set up something similar using a Raspberry Pi or any other smart home device, I'm all ears. I'm just looking for a simple way to monitor the reliability of my network connections.

Any recommendations or insights you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

I used to use Cacti for this (which is just an enhanced version of MRTG/PRTG), but it requires some knowledge to get up and running and configured. It should run fine on an Rpi. Probably overkill if all you want to monitor is uptime, I was monitoring dozens of interfaces for utilization, drops, CPU load, lots of other stuff.

There are 1000 apps out there that can do what you want, each in a different way with a different interface. Ones that are very specific to the purpose like netuptimemonitor and others that are more advanced but can do only what you're looking for.

Solarwinds used to have free versions of a lot of their products with a limit of the number of monitors/devices but I think they've gotten rid of those and just gone to a free trial. But there's plenty of others out there that are free/open source. May just need to look at various ones on google and see what one looks best to you, obviously being cautious to avoid no-name or questionable ones.