So you are busy editing a document on a web site such as Office 365 cloud and suddenly some features stop work, leading you to try other things without realizing that your internet connection has been dropped. Instead of opening your router interface and checking whether it has really been disconnected, you can use a tool like OverSite to automatically detect the network connectivity. It can also be used to monitor one or more websites and see if they are responding properly. In other words, OverSite can check the downtime of your internet connection as well as a group of websites.
OverSite uses the good old fashioned ping method to check the internet connectivity. It keeps pinging some well known websites or servers at regular intervals. If the ping command returns a positive result, then your internet connection is active otherwise there is some problem. Because one server may be dysfunctional, it checks multiple well known servers to ensure that it gets the correct response.
The same ping method is used to check the status of websites. You can add one or more websites to OverSite interface and it will repeatedly ping those sites after a specified period of time. If the websites are up and running, a good ping response is returned. But if the servers are configured not to listen to ping commands, then it might fail.
A graphical display is shown in OverSite window indicating when the internet connection or the websites were not working. For each day, it shows a bar – this bar is green at times when internet was working and in red color when the internet connection is down. Apart from the websites, you can also add IP addresses of routers and WiFi networks. This way you can tell if these networks are up and running or something has happened to them.
You can download OverSite from http://molliesoft.com/OverSite.