Monitoring WAN connection

[PHead2]

This isn't a Cisco question per say, but most of the people here seem pretty knowledgable about this sort of thing...

I'd like to monitor the state of our connection to our ISP because we have a problem (particularily with people using Terminal Services) where connections from the internet to our servers get disconnected fairly often. I'm sure it's not a problem with our LAN, we don't have many machines and everthing's connected with 100 Mbps switches. I've moitored the local traffic and it's not very heavy.

I'd particularily like to monitor whether or not the connections to the internet become unavaiable for any period of time and I'd like to log this data.

Does anyone have any suggestions for monitoring tools that would accomplish this?

 

[svermill]

Do you want real-time notification? Do you have a big budget? On the cheap side (~$60US), I've used Router IP Console (RIC) before. You can set it up to e-mail you and set off an audible alarm when a link goes down.

http://www.innerdive.com/products/ric/

I'm sure others have recommendations for higher-end stuff.

 

[Reisinger]

One word "Watchdog" it is easy to use an can be set up to page or email you when there is a problem.

Something else you may want to look into is MRTG it will give you an ideaof your peak utilization over a course of minutes hours days months years etc... it open source and I have successfully implemented it on NT 4.0 W2K and Red Hat Linux. It's very powerful if you are looking to geek out this is the tool for you!