We are getting packet loss alerts, but our server seems fine!

Generally speaking, occasional incidence of packet loss is not of major concern. Large scale IP networks are designed to prioritize traffic such that lower priority packets are the first to be dropped when the network is operating at full load. Naturally ICMP Ping packets are the lowest priority of all, since they serve only diagnostic purposes and carry no data payload.

So whilst some ping packet loss may be experienced, it is likely that HTTP and other higher priority traffic will not be subject to the same losses. Nonetheless, this may be considered a sign that a network is running at near its maximum capacity and may warrant a discussion with your network provider to ascertain the true situation.

You may wish to set the packet loss threshold to a higher level before triggering an alert if you are satisfied that other, more important network traffic is not affected in these instances.

Wormly conducts an automatic traceroute only when packet loss of 100% is observed.

In any case, to avoid false positives, alerts are only sent when packet loss in excess of the configured threshold is confirmed by at least 3 monitoring nodes, in geographically disparate locations.


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Ninja Tip: trace* will match traceroute.

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