Will the new ver (currently in beta i am told) be able to save the current pingplotter image when an alert fires ? what we want is to setup a machine that will monitor one or more addresses and then email and capture the output when the alert fires.

S.
ps. oh, also is it possible to monitor more than one address ?

The current beta does not have this feature (of emailing images). It does have the capability to email .pp2 save files, however, and then you can load that on the receiving PC with Ping Plotter. If that's not sufficient, let me know the scenario where you need images.

Also, the current beta doesn't allow multiple destinations from a single instance. You can, of course, run multiple instances to monitor multiple destinations. This (multiple destinations, single instance) is a definite area of work, however, and we are doing some limited testing with a version that allows this. This will not be ready for the release of version 2.40, however.

Pete,

The idea of the saving images on alert feature is this; We are currently arguing with an ISP regarding the quality of a line. What I want to do is to setup Ping Plotter to monitor the line via a ping and tracert and then to save the image when the destination is unavailble for any reason. When the users start to call up to tell me the line has dropped (about 1-2 minutes after the fact) I can be confident that PP has saved the info on screen. Its important to save it when it happens as the tracert results are the issue at hand. I am currently saving the image every x mins, but while this shows outages it doesnt show the tracert at the time of the outage.

Yesterday I spent a whole day sitting and watching PP waiting for the line to drop, and hitting PRINT SCREEN when it did. What fun!!! <img src="/forums/images/icons/wink.gif" alt="" />

Olly

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

Sounds perfect. I have decided to try this, and use the Auto Save Images feature so that I can quickly scan a directory of thumbnail images to identify red blocks that my have appeared during the night.

Cheers for your help

Olly

Thank you Olly for your comments and helping us kick ourselves in the butt to get this type of scenario into the tutorial. We get alot of questions concerning this so we have an entry now in the tutorial for it here.