Hi, Olly.

Thanks for the clarification.

You should be able to get this with the current feature set - and that is by saving the *data* rather than the image.

Ping Plotter allows you to use the timeline graphs to zoom in on any particular time - so even if you weren't there - or didn't save an image when something was happening - you can still recover that exact image later. You shouldn't ever have to be sitting in front of your computer when an outage happens.

Scenario:

You have outages (or situations you want to communicate to your ISP) randomly throughout the day, let's say twice a day.

Let's say you are keeping 24 hours of data in memory (or even more - I normally use 2.5 second trace intervals, and keep 200,000 samples in memory - which is almost a week's worth of data).

Using Ping Plotter's timeline graph, you can see over the past X time period (1 hour, 24 hours, 48 hours? Just change the timeline graph period by right-clicking on it) to identify a time period where there was problems. Problems will demonstrate themselves as packet loss (red), or high latency.

Now - you want to show the route - and the packet loss / latency in the upper graph for that time period. Since that time is already past, you need to change the focus of the upper graph to that time in the past.

First off, you need to make sure your "samples to include" focus in on just the period in question - so let's change that to 100 (it's important to *not* have it set to 0/all, but have it be a number smaller than the number of samples in memory to be able to focus the upper graph).

Now, double-click on the "problem period" in the lower graph. You'll see a bit of a focus rectangle appear on the lower time graph, and the upper graph will change to represent the data you have "focused" in the lower graph. Now, you might want to change the scale of the lower graph to show more detail. Right-click on the lower time graph and change the scale to an hour (or maybe even 30 or 10 minutes - depending on how long the outage was). The focus rectangle should still be visible (Ping Plotter versions 2.3 and higher try to keep the focus in view when you change graph scales). You can fine-tune the data being displayed in the upper graph by double-clicking on the lower graph again. The lower graph can also be dragged left and right to move forward or backwards in time.

Using these techniques, you should be able to zoom in on exactly the right data to best illustrate the problems you're seeing. You can look at the data after the problem occurs and get the perfect picture.

You can auto-save the data (I have the auto-save create me a new file every day) and then load up a prior day to do the same thing. This gives you the capability to have pretty close to 100% coverage of your network performance - and be able to zoom in on any particular outage.

The options in the alert setup do allow you to have the .PP2 file (data) emailed - and then you can use these same capabilities to zoom in on *that* data.

Let me know if this capability gives you everything you need - if not, please let me know what is missing. Based on your description, it sounds like Ping Plotter should be able to do everything you're after - we just need to add some additional documentation that clarifies how to do this kind of thing.

- Pete