North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Pinging routers for network status

  • From: Bill Woodcock
  • Date: Mon Dec 18 03:15:56 2000 
      On 17 Dec 2000, Sean Donelan wrote:
    > Most network providers ping their routers for network status.  Several
    > providers even track RTT to detect changes.  But very few customers
    > connect to routers. 

I'd disagree with this, at least from what I've observed of our
customers...  I see a fairly steady stream of ICMP directed to the
loopback and tail-circuit interfaces of our core and tail-circuit routers
from customer address space, and if I were to guess, I'd say that 10%-15%
of our customers were using some sort of ICMP-based uptime-monitoring
packages which are looking at their Internet connection, among other
things.  From talking with them, I think most of them are using them to
monitor WAN and VPN link uptime, and that they just throw our router into
the list as an afterthought.

                                -Bill