Network Logger Pro & IT

User Manual: URL/IP Monitoring

 

URL/IP Monitoring Section Contents


  • Introduction to URL/IP Monitoring
  • URL Monitoring Quick Start
  • Ping Monitoring
  • HTTP Monitoring
  • Picking a URL for Speed Testing
  • Graphing & Logging
  • Exporting Monitor Logs and Graphs
  • Cool tricks with customized spoken announcements

  • Back to the Main Table of Contents


    Introduction to URL/IP Monitoring



    Go to the File menu and select, "New URL Monitor." You will see a window that looks like this at the top:



    This shows everything you normally need to get started, but you can reveal additional optional settings by clicking on the disclosure triangle on the right:



    A URL Monitor sends a series of HTTP or Ping requests to a URL or IP address. It can graph download speeds or server response times. There is a test activity log in the bottom left, and a URL outage log in the bottom right. You can set up as many URL Monitors as you like and the target servers or devices can be on the Internet or your private network.



    Note: If you are performing active monitoring on a device on a private network, you will need to mark it as private to prevent interaction with it from affecting your Internet Connection Status. You will be asked if the device is on a private network or on the Internet by a dialog box that will come up after entering it's URL or IP address and there are also popup menus that allow you to change this designation any time before you start monitoring.


    URL Monitoring Quick Start

    Enter the URL or IP address of the device or server you want to monitor:



    If the primary URL you are monitoring doesn't respond, Network Logger tries a second URL to see if your internet connection is down or if the primary device went down. Enter a second URL to try in the "Secondary URL" field. We suggest using the web site of your service provider.

    The Secondary URL should not perform a large download, it is not used for speed testing, it can be any URL with a different domain, something like http://myserviceprovider.com is fine. Don't use a secondary URL that is hosted at the same physical site or shares a domain with your primary test URL because that obviates the purpose of having a secondary test URL.

    Then choose HTTP or Ping from the Test Type popup menu.



    Next, set the Test Interval and Test Duration popup menus:



    Check the other options, set them if desired, then move the slide switch in the upper left to "ON":



    Every URL monitoring session starts out with three quick requests to the device, spaced 10 seconds apart to establish a baseline, and then the request schedule you set is followed thereafter.

    Once you have started a monitoring session, you can no longer change the URL fields, the Test Type popup menu, or the URL location popup menus. This is enforced in order to keep the test result samples in a session consistent with each other. If you want to change these settings, close the Monitor window and create a new URL Monitor by going to the File menu.


    Ping Monitoring

    You can schedule ping requests to monitor outages and response time of any device or server that responds to pings. Enter the URL or IP address of the device or server you want to monitor, and then set the Test Type popup menu to "Ping."



    URLs should not have a protocol prefix such as "http://" when pinging, but should consist of a basic domain name without directory or filename suffixes, for example: "google.com". When the Test Type is set to Ping, several other options in the interface that apply only to HTTP monitoring will disappear and the test interval popup menus will change to give you shorter interval options.


    HTTP Monitoring

    You can schedule a series of HTTP requests to create regular download speed test readings to see if your internet connection speeds vary over time or to keep track of the the uptime and performance of a web site you are interested in monitoring.

    If you want to monitor a web site you own, enter the URL for that. If you want to do periodic download speed testing, enter the URL of a file that will take over 5 seconds to download which is located on a fast server to ensure an accurate speed measurement. See tips on picking a speed test URL in the section below titled, "Picking a Speed Test URL."

    The Primary and Secondary URL Location Popup Menus control whether replies from a device affect your Internet Connection Status:



    It's important that you specify the location of each URL or IP Address as either "On the Internet" or "On a private network" correctly, or your Internet Connection Log won't be accurate.



    The Retry Interval: If the Primary URL fails then the Secondary URL will be tried in a few seconds. The Retry Interval Popup Menu controls how much time will pass before trying the Primary URL again.



    The 1st and 2nd Timeout Popup Menus let you set the timeout periods of the Primary and Secondary URL requests. A request timeout is the amount of time a client waits for a reply from a server before deciding it is not going to answer and designating the reply as a failure.



    The Autosave Monitor Session Checkbox: Choosing this option will automatically save the current monitoring session as a numbered file in the Autosave Directory you specified every 15 minutes and also when you end an active session. The default autosave directory is "Documents/Network Logger Sessions."

    The Show HTTP Headers Checkbox: Choosing this option will include the HTTP headers sent by the server in the Activity Log. If you are having problems monitoring a server, turning this on can sometimes help by showing you the status code returned by your URL. This option only applies to HTTP monitoring and the checkbox will disappear when you set the Test Type to Ping.

    The Bypass Network Caches Checkbox: By default each time the Primary URL is sent, a token is added to the URL to make it unique. This ensures the request reaches the server and is not fulfilled by a cache in your computer, your router, or a switch or some other device along the way. This token is normally ignored by web servers. However, if you see a message about a "uniquifyingToken" in the Activity Log, your server may be blocking the request because of it. You can turn off unique tokens with this checkbox. This setting is intentionally not saved in the session file because it should normally be on, since network caches can mask the state of the end server. URL "uniquifying" tokens are not normally displayed in the URL activity log, but are shown if you click the "Show Headers" checkbox in the URL Monitor settings.






    Picking a URL for Speed Testing

    If you don't know what URL to use for speed testing, try one of the following:
  • Pick the URL of a large image file, such as one from Google Images, or a PDF file, or
  • Search for "download test files" on your favorite search engine, or
  • See if your internet service provider has some speed test files on one of their servers
  • Whatever file URL you pick for speed testing should meet two criteria:
  • A speed test file should take at least 5 seconds to download to ensure accurate speed measurement, but probably less than 20 to avoid generating unnecessary traffic.
  • A speed test file should be on a high performance server that is faster than your internet connection.
  • If you are using the Primary URL for measuring speed, make sure your URL is pointing to a file of some type, not just the domain name of a web site.

    You can tell if the URL you are using is not suitable for speed testing by watching the Realtime Display in the Network Status window. If you see other traffic that is faster than that generated by your speed test URL, pick another speed test URL.

    If you are downloading large files, make sure URL requests go out fairly infrequently to avoid generating too much network traffic.

    Keep good net etiquette in mind while choosing test frequency: it's not polite to send large numbers of requests to a server that's not yours or cause a lot of data to flow over networks without a good reason.

    Failure to observe good net etiquette may have real world consequences such as a web site banning your IP address or your provider shutting down your internet account. Malicious use of network resources may have legal consequences in some areas. Also check with your web hosts and service providers to make sure you won't incur unexpected monetary charges..

    This tool is powerful, use it carefully as you would with any active network utility. This program has a 30 second minimum delay between primary URL tests as a safety mechanism. The more time between tests and the smaller the file downloaded, the lesser the impact on traffic.





    Graphing & Logging

    When a test URL responds, it's transmission time, file size and speed statistics are entered in the URL Monitor activity log.


    The URL Monitor Activity Log



    URL requests can be graphed by response time or by data transmission speed from the server and can be plotted on linear or log scales using the Graph Type popup menu. The graph below shows speed in megabits per second. In the default color theme, blue lines show the speed of Primary URL request data, red lines show a URL request failure, green lines represent requests sent to the secondary URL to verify that the network was up during a Primary URL test failure, which means that a device failed to respond, while the local network continued to operate normally.

    Slider controls around the edges control scaling and the viewing area of the graph. The slider that controls horizontal scrolling only appears after the scaling is changed from 100% which makes the data take up more area than the view. The mousewheel can also be used to control the vertical scale slider and the horizontal scrolling and scale sliders, depending on which the mouse is closer to.



    If bars on the graph appear in yellow in the default color theme, this means that too little data is being downloaded to measure speed accurately and you will get a message about this in the Activity Log. If you are not using the Primary URL to do speed testing, you can ignore this message. Otherwise use a URL to a bigger file that takes at least 5 seconds to download.

    When the primary URL fails to respond several times in a row, and the secondary URL confirms that the network is up, the primary URL is declared offline and an entry is added to the URL Monitor Outage Log. You can control the number of failures it takes to declare an outage in the Preferences. When the web site comes back online, the URL and the outage duration are also recorded in the log. You can use this behavior as an alternative, or as a supplement to Automatic Connectivity Testing.




    Exporting Logs and Graphs

    Under the File menu, you will find options for saving and opening URL Monitor sessions and exporting all the graphs and logs in Network Logger.



  • Export Test Results as CSV - writes the samples from selected URL Monitor to a file in the "Comma separated values" format. This can be imported into a spreadsheet, among other things.
  • Export URL Test Graph - exports the URL test graph of the selected URL Monitor as a PDF file.
  • Export URL Outage Log - writes the contents of the URL Outage log for the selected URL Monitor out to a text file. This is in the same format as if you had copied it out of the URL Outage Log field and is not tab or comma delimited.



  • Cool tricks with customized spoken announcements

    When monitoring a server URL or a device IP address with a URL Monitor you can customize the spoken and logged status announcements by entering a custom announcement in the fields at the bottom of the URL Monitor Settings:



    With this you can set up spoken announcements such as:

  • The company website is down.
  • The smart TV in Johnny's bedroom has been turned on.
  • The IP security camera by the garage went down.
  • The online store payment gateway is not responding.

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    copyright © 2017 Lyle Andrews.
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