what is the best way to record connection down time

[rootfive]

Hi,

I have a few private lease line and main internet connection. From time to time ISP lost connection to internet. I want to take record of service interruption record. Can it be done with Cacti and if so how can I do it? Any guidance will be great help.

Regards,

[gandalf]

Do you have a script that changes it's (numerical) output in case the connection is up/down?
R.

[rootfive]

Thanks gandalf for your taking time to reply. I can monitor the interface on router. But the connection lost happened at up stream in ISP network. I can make ping graph to the ip at up stream. With Cacti, record will be lost after a few months because down time is only 1 or 2 minutes. Should I try Nagios for this type of job?

Regards,
R5

[TheWitness]

Well, if it's just one line, you could write a script in inittab that runs in an everlasting loop that records to the cacti log any time the link changes state. If you write it in Cacti log style format.

Then you can parse this using an independent (localhost) type of graph template that simply tails the log file and echo's 0 (aka down) 1 (aka up). Then rrdtool can give you the average. In other words, if the average for the month is 0.99999 (that's 99.999% availability/reachability. This can easily be translated to minutes of downtime.

If you were going to do it for 1000 interfaces, then, I would write a plugin.

TheWitness

[gandalf]

With Cacti, record will be lost after a few months because down time is only 1 or 2 minutes. Should I try Nagios for this type of job?

That only happens when using default settings. You may increase the RRA size. See 2nd link of my sig, rrdtool section, to find a script that does this
R.