Hey All,

No-one in my tech forum can help – thought it’s time to ask the MTB’ers 🙂

Do any of you know of any tool or service that can be used to track devices dropping off networks over time?

Basically I want an iOS tablet to be able to communicate with other tablets / printers on a LAN. Ideally sending Ping Pong throughout the day to the other devices. If the tablet drops off the network or cannot reach one of the other devices I need to track it over time. Basically iPad tablet one failed to get response from Android tablet no 2.

My networking / IP knowledge is not where it needs to be for this one.

You’d need to write an App to do that on an iPad etc. If you have a Linux box on your network, you could easily script something and create a webpage summary….

NB There are loads of commercial NMS apps for tracking who is / isn’t on a network…

Eg Download a freeware / trail version of

https://www.whatsupgold.com/

I did some integration work with our product and Intermapper, just used their demo version for it..

https://www.helpsystems.com/products/network-monitoring-software

So,

I can develop and integrate the SDK of a third party service into iOS / Android Apps that will be sitting on devices.

What I’m looking for is if there is a pre-existing tool build specifically for this that can store and flag the data or let me export events in a csv so I don’t have to build my own version of something that already exists.

I’m not sure but i think this device and associated app can do this kind of thing amongst other things.

https://www.fing.com/products/fingbox

What I’m looking for is if there is a pre-existing tool build specifically for this that can store and flag the data or let me export events in a csv so I don’t have to build my own version of something that already exists.

If you just want a log of which device was on the network for what time period, then that is basic NMS functionality. Just pick a tool which has iOS App support and off you go. Configuration is just adding the IPs of the devices you want monitored. It will then ping them (or use SNMP) to determine who is on the LAN and who isn’t.

Loads out there

OpenNMS (we use this, utterly shite UI, all our customers hate it)
WhatsUpGold
InterMapper

etc

Who is the vendor of your wifi network. Is its decent enterprise grade then it should have detailed logs of all devices joining and leaving the network.

I am not an infrastructure person at all, I’m a software one, but if you’re trying to track something dropping out due to inactivity, I’d be wary that by sending a ping from that device you may be triggering the management stuff to keep that device alive on the network, making it an invalid test.

May be totally barking up the wrong tree though!

Physically track it?  Would one of the location sharing apps do the trick?  The type you might use to warn you if your kids / elderly parents have gone awol and where (assuming they carry the device around).  Not sure if they need triggering every 24 hours though.

Thanks so much all.

Basically NMS is what I’m looking for. Ideally something that can sit on our tablets / Apps and talk to our other tablets / apps sitting on the same network.

Our challenge is we own the tablets / Apps and these are always consistent over all locations. We have access to the network from our hardware in basically any way we want but not any NMS tool or router that may be used.

We see lots of Cisco, Meraki, Ubiquiti with great to shocking setups. People with shocking setups will not admit to it or give us access to their infrastructure so I want to track disconnects ourselves.

Basically looks like like I need to research NMS and the above vendors to see if any have iOS / Android SDK’s or functionality.

Thanks again all, massively appreciated. Any more info through over.

How about using your Android device to monitor your wireless devices?

Pingtools (playstore App) has a watcher task as well as loads of other useful looking network monitoring features.

If you’re looking to monitor the user experience between devices, that’s more complex.

I basically need access to the data offsite. Could easily run App like Pingtools in the background if it stored all the data and instances of devices joining / dropping off network that I could pull remotely as CSV or via API. Challenge with most of the Apps is having access to historic data I can pull / query.

More than happy to spend money so not just looking for a free App / service either, just need something suitable.

Then an NMS is what you probably need, I’ve used SolarWinds a lot in the past and they have trials and free to use apps.

Ok this is an idea.

If you want to see if item A (your tablet) has fallen off the network without the tablet it’s self doing a request to the network you could try this.

Have a second device connected to the network. Have a Cron job that periodically clears your ARP table then sends a ping request. This should force the router to do a who has request. If your device is still connected then you will get a result back of not you will get a failure. Pipe the results with a timestamp to a file. If you want to test multiple devices then just loop though an array of devices and give them a meaningful name and or UID so that you can pipe that to a file as well. You can set up the script to s Nd you a mail with the results on another Cron job.

As I said this is an idea but I think it could give you some powerful results. You would have to make sure the tablet you are checking doesn’t go to sleep or similar. I know you were asking for a off the shelf solution but this should be quite a easy shell script for a system administrator to throw together for you and run from a device with a bash terminal.