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#232 - 07/17/00 12:56 AM Suggestion: Show failed pings in alternate color
Marc_Kupper Offline


Registered: 07/11/00
Posts: 12
Loc: California
I just noticed that you can enable multiple time lines and now have one for each of the four hops of the link I'm monitoring. Very Cool!<br><br>Right now you are showing a red bar in all of the time lines regardless of which hop the error occurred on.<br><br>My suggestion is to show a red bar in the time line if that was the hop that got the error. If a hop other than the one displayed is the one that failed then show a yellow bar. Thus if you are showing time lines for all hops you'd see yellow bars all lined up except for the hop(s) that got the error where you would see a red bar. The idea is that by looking at multiple time lines you can get a sense of which are taking errors at various times. I know that if a hop in the middle goes down hard then all following hops will report as failed but the different colors may help people make sense of intermittent outages.<br><br>Marc<br><br>

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#233 - 07/21/00 07:05 PM Re: Suggestion: Show failed pings in alternate color [Re: Marc_Kupper]
Pete Ness Offline



Registered: 08/30/99
Posts: 1106
Loc: Boise, Idaho
Hi Marc.<br><br>Having Ping Plotter color the hops differently would make it speculate on what's actually happening. I've considered adding some speculative logic, but not done anything with it yet - as it's a bit of a responsibility coming up with the right speculation.<br><br>I'm also not sure about the coloring thing - because there's only so much you can show with this. What happens if hop 3 is "randomly" losing 10% of the data, while hop 4 is losing 15% and hope 5 is losing 50%? Whose fault is it - and what color should it paint each of these hops? Also, if it's a 25% loss, hop 3 is likely to lose different samples than hop 4 or 5, so they're often not directly correlated.<br><br>I find that the upper graph is pretty good for determening where the problem lies - just by the PL% numbers. A text summary of the problem may be in order, but using colors for this makes me a bit uncomfortable - there's just *SO* many possible areas for packet loss, deteriorating line speeds, and other ptoblems - that I don't want to offer the wrong answer when there problems arise. So, for now, I've been giving *no* summary of the problem.<br><br>I actually toyed around a bit with including a basic-style interpreter that could be used to write some basic rules to summarize the line conditions/trouble spots, but decided that for now, it wasn't worth it.<br><br>As always, suggestions are welcome on this topic (or others!).<br><br>Thanks for the feedback!<br><br><br>

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