Network troubleshooting – Colasoft Ping Tool
I was experiencing some VPN problems between our main site and a store. Ocassionally the VPN connection would be dropped without any obvious reason when taking a look in the network monitoring system. Troubleshooting on the router didn’t show any problems at all either. I was recommended to give Colasoft Ping Tool a try.
Colasoft Ping Tool is a great, freeware application for sending ICMP packets to one or more hosts. It has a simple and intuitive interface and offers what you need like saving overall statistics, graphs and logs. This is very good when you have to convince somone else (like an ISP) that there is a problem they need to take care of.
Well, back to my problem. After ruling out problems with the router itself, I fired up Colasoft Ping Tool. I started to ping the LAN (over VPN) and WAN interface on the connection in question. At the same time I also wanted to ping another location without any problems in the same area. If you look at the chart below you’ll easily notice that theres a big difference even though the configuration was exactly the same.
I called the ISP, presented the graphs and the logs, and they accepted to monitor the connection for a couple of days. After that they accepted they had a problem and fixed it quickly.
Colasoft Ping Tool is a great application which I’ve used several times since. It always gives you an idea of what to rule out or shows you if there’s a problem.
