Network Logger Pro & IT

User Manual

 

Contents


  • Getting Started
  • Network Status Menu
  • Internet Connection Monitoring
  • The Options Menu
  • The File Menu: Saving Sessions & Exporting Connection Status Logs and Graphs
  • Preferences
  • Email Reports
  • URL / IP Monitoring
  • Router Monitoring
  • Notes for Power Users
  • Cool tricks with customized spoken announcements

  • Getting Started

    When launched, certain functions of Network Logger start working automatically with no configuration needed. These include:

  • Internet connectivity testing and outage logging

  • Graphing of the speed of network traffic crossing the internal network interfaces of your Mac, such as Wifi & Ethernet.

  • Common Uses of Network Logger

  • If you want to get a list of services outages on your internet connection, you don't have to do anything. As they occur they will be added to the list in the Internet Connection Outage Log in the upper left corner of the Network Status Panel.

  • If you want see the speeds of network traffic flowing into and out of your computer, you don't have to do anything. That appears in the Realtime and History graphs of the Network Status Panel which are described below.

  • If you want to set up regular speed tests of your internet connection, to get a long term graph of downloads performed on a schedule, read the section called "URL / IP Monitoring", and also note the topic there called "Picking a URL for Speed Testing, that part is critical for setting up meaningful tests."

  • If you want to monitor a web server, to see it's speeds from your location and to log any outages, click on "URL / IP Monitoring", and read the relevant sections.

  • If you want to monitor the speeds of a device on your local area network (LAN) which supports monitoring via the UPnP or SNMP protocols, then you will want the Router Monitoring section.


  • Description of the Network Status Panel

    When you launch Network Logger, you will see the Network Status Panel. It will take a few minutes of sampling network traffic before yours fills in and looks like the picture below.



    The Network Status Panel


    In the upper right, you will see a section called the Realtime Display showing data flowing across your active local network interface(s), such as WiFi and/or Ethernet and any UPnP/SNMP monitored devices. The Realtime Display shows the last 10 minutes (or so) of network activity and is helpful for seeing what your current traffic looks like. The vertical axis of this graph is measured in bits per second. If you have more interfaces or devices than can be shown at one time, you can scroll vertically through them or even tell it to scroll up and down automatically (this last feature can be found in the Option menu).



    The Realtime Display


    You can set the vertical axis to be linear or logarithmic. A logarithmic graph is a type of graph often used in technical fields to show more detail on the lower end of the scale while still showing the full range.

    Clicking on a graph in the Realtime Display selects that network interface or device and displays a long term graph of traffic for it in the bottom of the Network Status window. This view is called the History Graph. Over time the period shown in the History Graph can stretch out to show weeks or months of network activity. You can use the sliders on the edges of the graph to change the scale and scroll left and right.



    The History Graph


    The legend at the top of the History Graph shows the name of the currently selected network interface or UPnP/SNMP monitored device, and the colors representing traffic going in and out. In the default color theme shown here, incoming traffic is light blue, outgoing traffic is dark blue and system sleep periods are tinted in grey and connection outages are shown in red.


    Network Status Menu

    You can display an Internet Connection Status light and network speeds in the menu bar at the top of your main screen by going to the Options menu and choosing Show Status Bar Menu. Green means you are connected to the Internet, red means a connection outage is occuring. The speeds are in bits per second.



    If you have more than one network interface or monitored device you can select which to display in the menu bar and in the History Graph with with this menu, or by clicking on its graph in the Realtime Display.


    Internet Connection Monitoring

    Network Logger constantly monitors your internet connection with a feature called Automatic Connectivity Testing (ACT). This feature is turned on by default, when ACT determines that your internet connection is active you will see the status message, "Connection Online" along with a green indicator in the top center of the Network Status window. This is not simply reflecting the status provided by the macOS operating system, which indicates a connection to an external network device, it's status is determined by detecting data being received from servers on the internet.

    If you want to turn off Automatic Connectivity Testing or change it's maximum test interval (the default is 1 minute), you can do so in the Network Logger Preferences. Automatic Connectivity Tests occur more frequently after a failed connection test and then intervals gradually increase to the maximum test interval.

    Automatic Connectivity Testing generates a very small amount of network traffic, on the order of a few dozen bytes when a test goes occurs. This is something to keep in mind if you are dealing with capped or metered bandwidth as you could use up a small quota or incur charges.

    You can see the Connection Outage Log in the upper left of the Network Status Panel:



    The Connection Outage Log


    When either Automatic Connection Testing or a URL Monitor detects that your internet conneciton has gone down, multiple checks will be made to ensure that the connection really is down, and then a connection outage will be declared. You can control how many failures it takes to declare an outage in the Preferences. The Connection Status indicator on the Network Status Panel will change to "Connection Down" and an entry will be made in the Connection Outage Log. You can copy the contents of the log if you need to paste it elsewhere.

    Network Logger can also detect DNS outages (unless you have turned off Automatic Connection Testing in the Preferences). DNS stands for Domain Name Service, which is the part of the internet that turns the domain names in URLs into IP addresses, so that packets of data can be routed to their destination on the internet. IP addresses are just the numbers that identify devices on the internet, such as computers, servers, switches, routers, and mobile devices.

    During a DNS outage, URLs can't be resolved to IP addresses, but IP based traffic is still flowing. The fixes for this are very different than those for connection outages and it's sometimes hard to tell the difference between the two. Network Logger will correctly identify each type of outage for you in the Connection Log.

    Connection Outages Not Being Recorded

    If you think you are experiencing internet connection outages that are not being recorded in the log, first watch the ACT Activity Window (from the Window menu) during an outage you create yourself, then try changing the testing method and/or the number of failures required to declare an outage in the Preferences, these settings are described in more detail there.


    An Alternate Method of Connection Testing

    If you don't want to use the ACT feature for connection logging, there is another way you can set Network Logger up. Some users have encountered unusual types of outages related to ISP account authentication issues in which pings and http header requests get through to the internet, but http requests do not. The following method for configuring Network Logger will detect that situation.

    First, turn off ACT by going to the Preferences and setting the Automatic Connection Test Frequency to Off. That will shut off automatic pings and http header requests.

    Then go to the File Menu and choose New URL Monitor. Enter two different URLs and set how often you want them checked. Then hit the switch to ON. You might get a message in the Activity Log about the URLs not being suitable for speed testing, but since we are just using them for connection testing in this case you can ignore that message.

    This will do regular http requests (as opposed to pings and http header requests) and should reflect the connection state you see in your browser. The reason we normally use pings and http header requests is because they use much less bandwidth and put less load on the network, and therefore we can do them more frequently without putting undue load on networks and servers, so they are usually the preferred method for connection monitoring.




    The Options Menu


  • Show Status Bar Menu - Adds a status item showing your network speeds and internet connection status to your menu bar at the top of your screen on the right hand side.
  • Internet Connection Status Announcements - Turn on/off speech synthesized announcements when your internet connection goes down or comes back up.
  • URL Monitoring Status Announcements - Turn on/off speech synthesized announcements when a server or device you are monitoring goes down or comes back up.
  • Color Themes - Allows you to choose from different preset color themes that determine the look of the application. You can also create your own color themes.
  • AutoScroll Realtime Graphs - Turn on/off automatic vertical scrolling of Realtime Display graphs if you have more network interfaces that will fit in the view at one time.



  • The File Menu: Saving Sessions & Exporting Logs and Graphs

    Under the File menu, you will find options for saving and opening URL Monitor sessions, saving and opening Network History sessions, and exporting all the graphs and logs in Network Logger Pro or IT. Network History session files store all the information in the Network Status window. Usually you won't save them manually yourself since Network History sessions are autosaved every 15 minutes (by default) and on quitting the application. The previous Network History session can be loaded automatically on application launch, see the Preferences for setting the desired behavior.



  • 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 History Graph - exports the History Graph for the selected network interface or monitored device in the Network Status Panel as a PFD file.
  • Export URL Outage Log - writes the contents of the URL Monitor 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.
  • Export Connection Outage Log - writes the contents of the Connection Outage log in the Network Status Panel out to a text file. This is in the same format as if you had copied it out of the Connection Outage Log field and is not tab or comma delimited.




  • Preferences


    Choosing "Preferences" from the "Network Logger" menu or hitting the Command and comma keys together will show the Preferences window:



    Autosave Network History: A Network History Session consists of all of the information in the Network Status window. By default this session is written to a file in the Network Logger Sessions directory every 15 minutes and on application termination. If any URL Monitors are active and have their own Autosave setting turned on, then references to their seperate autosave files will be saved along with the Network History Session so those URL Monitoring Sessions can be opened automatically along with the Network History Session on application launch.

    On application launch: You can set the launch behavior of Network Logger to either start a fresh session (recommended, simply to keep the application footprint light), to ask whether to load the last session, or to automatically load the last session, which might be helpful if you want to automatically continue monitoring after a power failure on a dedicated machine.

    Time Format: Choose between 24 or 12 hour time formats.

    Internet Connection System Notifications: Here you can choose which internet connection events trigger macOS Notification Center alerts.

    URL Monitoring System Notifications: Here you can choose which URL Monitor events trigger macOS Notification Center alerts.

    Traffic Sampling Interval: This controls how often network traffic is sampled from the built in network interfaces in your computer and also how often requests for network traffic stats are sent to SNMP and UPnP devices, such as routers on your LAN.

    Maximum Samples: This is the sample buffer size for the Network History and URL Monitor graphs. Old samples that fall off the edge are discarded. Note that older samples in the Network History graph may be consolidated into larger samples to preserve graph shape while extending the period displayed.

    Router Discovery Interval: This value controls how often router discovery is performed on your LAN to find devices that are actively supporting UPnP and SNMP.

    SNMP Scan Rate: This value controls the interval between each IP address tried when looking for SNMP devices on your LAN.

    Menubar Status Item Size: The data speed display in the menu bar can be toggled between two sizes, "Compact", which is fairly small and uses limited menubar space efficiently, and "Legible" which is intended for easier reading.

    Invert Menubar Status Item Text Color: This inverts the color of the text showing the speed statistics in the menubar. If your combination of light/dark mode and your desktop image make the text hard to see, changing this can improve it's visibility.

    Custom HTTP User Agent: If HTTP requests from Network Logger are getting blocked by your ISP or by a web server you are trying to monitor, it may be because they are trying to block web bots. This is sometimes done by only allowing requests with known User Agent codes. Every web client, such as Safari or Chrome has a unique User Agent code that allows web sites to know how many people are visiting with each type of browser. If your web browser can reach a URL that Network Logger cannot, it is likely due to the User Agent code. The recommended solution is to enter the User Agent code of your web browser into Network Logger here. There are web sites that will tell you the User Agent code of your web browser. You can find them by doing a web search on "what is my user agent".



    Automatic Connection Testing: The Automatic Connection Testing feature may be turned on or off here. When on, this feature starts testing your internet connection automatically as soon as the application is launched. It is on by default. Confirmed outages are logged in the Connection Outage Log field in the Network Status window.

    Automatic Connection Testing Method: If you think you are experiencing internet connection outages that are not being recorded, first watch the ACT Activity Window (from the Window menu) during an outage you create yourself, then try changing the testing method and/or the number of failures required to declare an outage here. The default connection testing method, "Smart Ping & HTTP" should work for most people. The other methods are provided because we have seen customers who have experienced partial internet outages, which let some types of traffic through and not other types, who want those events to be recorded as outages. This can happen when a user's modem is not authenticating properly with their Internet Service Provider system and the ISP's authentication firewall is letting some types of traffic through but not others. If you choose the "HTTP" method, the entire HTTP "BODY" does not get downloaded, just the header and the first batch of "BODY" bytes the server sends, in order to keep bandwidth load low. While this keeps the data load very light, the other testing methods are even lighter.

    Smart Ping & HTTP testing enables outages to be declared if http requests stop working but pings still respond or if ping requests stop working but http requests still get responses. This can sometimes happen when your modem doesn't authenticate with your ISP properly and their firewall blocks http traffic but still lets pings through so their technicians can still test their system even while someone's account is suspended. It's a tricky condition and while not technically an outage in the sense of a broken wire or equipment, most users still experience it as an outage and want an outage declaration in the log.

    Automatic Connection Testing Interval: This value controls the maximum time interval between Automatic Connection Tests. The time interval may be shorter at times to improve the chance of catching an outage in progress. To turn Automatic Connection Testing off, choose "Off" from this menu.

    Number of Failed Tests Required to Declare an Outage: This value controls how many failed server requests in a row it takes for an internet connection outage to be declared. It is used both by both Automatic Connectivity Testing and URL Monitors.

    Current Test Regime: You can create your own lists of URLs and IP addresses used for Internet connection testing, a set of 3 lists is required for using the Smart Ping & HTTP testing method and so that requirement is enforced across the board. A set of 3 lists is called a Test Regime. The first is a list of URLs that respond to HTTP requests, the second is a list of URLs that respond to pings, and the third is a list of IP addresses that respond to pings. You may wish to create your own custom Test Rgime if you run into issues with enterprise firewalls flagging specific test addresses in the Default lists while using the Default Test Regime. Default Test Regime addresses are not shown. If you do find addresses in the Default lists via firewall alerts that have been blacklisted, you are invited to email them to us for removal from the Default Test Regime at support@networklogger.net.





    Email Reports ("IT" version or upgraded "Pro" version"only)


    If you have Network Logger IT or the Email Reports upgrade for Network Logger Pro, you can specify a list of email recipients to be notified when a server or device goes down and when service is restored. When the URL Monitor settings are visible (click on the disclosure triangle on the right of a URL Monitor window) you can see the "Email" checkbox on the far lower right. Email addresses to recieve device status change notifications via email. You can send test messages with the "Test" button. If you don't see your test email right away, check your spam/junk email folder.



    You can also specify a list of email recipients to be notified after an internet connection outage occurs. Click on the "Email" checkbox in the Network Status Panel to reveal the recipients field for internet connection outage reports. Connection Outage email reports are, for obvious reasons, sent after service is restored.



    Enter one email address per line to send connection outage notifications after internet service is restored.




    Notes for Power Users:


  • The test activity log clears itself when it gets too full, but all samples will still appear in the graph.

  • Over time, the view of older traffic on the left of the History Graph becomes simplified in order to save memory, but the graph will still show the major features you are likely to be interested in such as peak speeds and large blocks of network activity. When History Graph samples get very old and the graph can't be simplified any more then the oldest Network Activity samples will get dropped.

  • You can reveal extra timing options for URL testing when using the HTTP Test Type by clicking in the graph area of a URL Monitor an then pressing the "P" key. You will hear a beep and then the popup menus that control timing will have more choices.

  • Data sizes in all operating systems used to be reported using "binary prefix" notation in which 1024 bytes mean one kilobyte, 1024 kilobytes mean one megabyte and so on, but in 1998 this was officially changed by an IEC standard to "decimal prefix" notation to conform to metric scientific notation and now one kilobyte means 1000 bytes, 1000 kilobytes means one megabyte and so on. macOS uses the IEC standard decimal prefix notation and Network Logger reports speeds and data sizes using this standard as well.

  • The "IT" version of Network Logger sends email reports through the following process, the statistics about the outage are posted to the server at networklogger.net via HTTP POST, then an email is composed on the server and emailed from there to the address you have specified. This means that your firewall must allow HTTP POSTs in order for this to work."
  • If the specified duration for a URL monitoring session comes to an end during an outage of the device being monitored, the session will continue until the outage is over.

  • copyright © 2021 Lyle Andrews.
    All rights reserved.