Connection Quality

Along with host state monitoring, Ping Monitor allows you to monitor the quality of connection to remote hosts, based on the set of the latest ping replies. The parameters used for connection quality calculation can be specified on the Connection Quality preference page Pic 1. To reach this page, click the Preferences button from the Application Menu and selecting the Connection Quality link on the navigation bar on the left in the opened dialog.

Specifying connection quality monitoring configuration

Pic 1. Specifying connection quality monitoring configuration

When calculating a connection quality, Ping Monitor can use such characteristics as the percentage of lost packets, the latency percentile and the latency jitter. The Sample Size field is used to specify the number of most latest pings to be used for quality calculation. Ping Monitor can estimate the connection quality when the sample is incomplete, i.e. the number of responses in the sample is below its size. The Estimate Quality Since field is used to specify the minimum number of responses sufficient to estimate the connection quality, while it will be considered Pending with a lower number of responses.

A connection quality is considered Critical in case all packets from the sample are lost. For the Bad and Warning quality, you can specify the conditional values to check for packet loss percentage, latency and jitter. In case no condition is reached, the connection quality is treated as Good.

The packet loss percentage is a ratio of the number of lost packets from the sample to the number of packets sent within the same sample. The latency percentile separates the greater and lesser parts of a round-trip times data set. The percentile specified in the Latency Percentile field is used. The sample for calculation is built from a specified number of the latest delivered packets. The jitter is calculated as a packet delay variation for a sample of delivered packets of a specified length with reference to the specifications defined in RFC-1889. If you prefer not to use latency percentile or jitter in quality calculation, you can uncheck the appropriate options.

With EMCO Ping Monitor, it is possible not only to set a common connection quality monitor configuration, but also to provide a specific one for each host individually. See the Overriding Common Settings part of this document for details.