Good Mac app for showing how frequently your internet connection is dropped?

[jamesryanbell]

Just curious. I've looked on the App Store and google, but I haven't found anything that shows dropped connections over time.

Example: I want to look at the past hour and see how many times my network connection has gone out and come back on.

Thanks so much.

 

[datmr]

Assuming you mean wifi or ethernet then there are plenty - look under "network monitoring tools" for corporates. Network engineers and admins use them all the time to monitor their systems.

For example - from first page of Google
http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/17636/netcheck

Be careful as although most of those tools are free or cheap, some are designed for enterprise-class networks and can be very expensive (i.e. more than the Mac)

There's similar tools for wifi e.g. Kismac, which is free, but again check price of others.
http://kismac-ng.org/

What you're doing is quite technical and beyond the needs of most home users so there aren't really any staggeringly easy to use 1 click to do it programs. You will need to analyse the log files and alerts produced by the various tools; some can email you if a connection goes down.

LINUX has a lot of good free tools that do this, if you know how to use it or port it to the Mac. If you're feeling adventurous you can ping the server continually in a terminal and just log that

PS. If you mean dialup, I know they exist but I can't tell you where to look because I ceased to care about dialup years ago

 

[jamesryanbell]

I'm talking about wifi networks.

What I'm specifically looking for is a graph that shows how frequently connections drop.

 

[datmr]

use kismac and then feed the logs into a graph drawing program (the log is a text file it makes while it runs, that contains all the data it captures from the wifi)

it'll log signal strength over time, and has GPS integration, hence you can also map out wifi coverage zones as you walk around the building, thus, you can monitor signal strength over time at various locations, and determine where to place your bridges and repeaters or where to aim your directional aerials

i dont know of any programs that magically do it with 1 click but kismac + a spreadsheet *WILL* do it (because i learned it in the old days and don't see the need to re-train, so don't know the newer apps ... most of them are just front ends for kismet though, like kismac is

some of the advanced features of kismac require your wireless card to have certain specific features or specific drivers; all wifi monitors will be the same in this respect. For doing what you want to do however, a basic card should be fine.

kismac is mac version of kismet; if you get stuck with kismac you can look up docs for kismet as well

 

[jamesryanbell]

Thanks for taking the time to post an answer that detailed. I appreciate it a lot.

 

[Aranby]

Just curious. I've looked on the App Store and google, but I haven't found anything that shows dropped connections over time.

Example: I want to look at the past hour and see how many times my network connection has gone out and come back on.

Thanks so much.

[doublepost=1488850229][/doublepost]I set my email client (Outlook) to do a mail check every 3 mins ... Connection failures are recorded in the Outlook error log.