In the some editions (for example some free residential snapshot services) we measure reachability rather than uptime.

Our paid proxyNM solution offers a full uptime measurement capability however we do not deploy that in the free services.

It is important to understand the subtle differences between the two so you can interpret your reachability numbers when trying to unravel any underlying issues with your residential broadband service.

Uptime performs a regular test to multiple destinations across your internet connection. These tests are performed regardless of contact with our servers and results are cached on the agent should the link to the servers be down.

It will test to multiple destinations to protect against a single destination failure being wrongly interpreted as a network uptime issue.

It will also test using a variety of protocols and methods for a richer result set. We typically deploy multiple agents on multiple computers in the same location to help with agent/computer absence. We can even deploy on a small appliance to help with this scenario.

Importantly, we also use a ‘location determinant’ test to ensure your computer and agent are in the place we expect them to be before we report the network as up or down.

Finally, we can use this approach to measure the uptime of the network as well as key applications.

In the case of the free service, we only measure the reachability of the proxyNM agent on your computer. This is the ability of our servers to talk with the agent on your computer periodically. We report that as reachability in the RRe: Reachability visualisation.

Bear in mind that these results can be misleading if you take your computer away from your home, your computer is powered off (or goes to sleep) or if we have scheduled maintenance.

These issues are touched upon in articles on RRe: Reachability, Gaps and Power Settings.