Information and Support

Hi, There is a video on the installation process on the top page of www.outagesio.com. If you're running a Microsoft or other virus protection scanner, you may get a screen asking if it's okay to run this application. Click OK or whatever your virus scanner requests to approve the installation. On Windows 10, click on the "More Info" link you'll see the "Run Anyway" link appear. Click that and the install will begin. This is Windows being overly protective in an odd way. They charge us yearly fees for a certification yet their operating system still does exactly what you've just explained. We don't understand it :). When we originally started, the project was called NutPile Networks (www.nutpile.com) and we've since changed the name but have been so busy with site/service related work that changing the code/names has taken a back seat. It's easier to explain to people that it's ok, it's our software, just has the original name. BTW, to ensure a proper installation, there are two other points I should mention. Make sure that you're logged into your PC with full administrator privileges. This is important because a lower level account may not allow the installer to install the software as it needs to. The second thing is making sure you've removed any previous copy of the agent if there was one installed before. If you don't, the installer may install two copies and neither will work. I hope this helps you to complete the installation.

Hi, I'm afraid there is not at this time. It took a lot of effort and cost to get the code working right and to become what it is. We have talked about the possibility of making it available to some developers at some point or offering an API but we've not had much time to get past the thinking stage yet. In fact, we've removed code from it to make it as small and basic as possible, putting more emphasis on the network side rather than into the agent side. What do you have in mind? You can PM me if you prefer.

Hi, We are in a transition adding some of the business side features into OutagesIO. This may help explain what is going on: Introducing Extended reports We are also trying to update all of the help notes in the pages where you configure etc. Grayed out items mean they are not available in the current level of reports meaning Basic but are available in Extended reports. Some of the things you see are in transition where we need to catch up with help here and there. We do post in the new features section of this forum however to let members know what we're up to. It's s work in progress. We also mentioned in a few places that we're happy to give members a preview, all we ask for is some feedback in the forums on how OutagesIO has or is helping. A problem with our free service is that we have a lot of people using it but next to no one giving us feedback which makes it hard to know about problems, ideas, suggestions and more importantly, how it's helping.

These are the kinds of things we love to hear about. Thank you for sharing this experience.

Hi, Yes, you are right, this is a bug and is getting fixed right this moment. Thank you very much for letting us know. Feel free to ask anything you need about the service and we'll be happy to help.

Sure, we could add that. I quickly tested using a word I knew would not exist on the server and of course it promptly logged me out of the server. Great, it works, now maybe I should use it in the script next time :). The script has already been updated. Thanks very much for the suggestion.

Hi, We are constantly working on the services and every now and then, are not aware that something broke. I've passed this on to the developers who tell me this will be fixed in a few minutes. Thank you very much for taking the time to tell us.

Hi, Let's start with some basic things. First, near the top of the starter_linux_ocp.sh script, is the version number 1.0.3? Second, did you set the 'start' path in the script? It's on the 7th line I believe. start="/xxx" (set the path where you want to have the agent downloaded to and running from). Let's start with that.

Hi James, I have a new hardware agent which I received last week and it's failed to remain running for more than about 10 minutes. I plugged it in and created an agent on the website, successfully communicating with it and setting it up. Hardware agents are pre-created and waiting for you to activate it once you receive it. When you install or 'create' software agents, you are prompted to pick the operating system version. The installer eventually prompts you to enter your login credentials so that it can find out which account to assign your new agent to. You mention showing 'continue installation' would be a software agent and unrelated to your hardware agent. When you first create a software agent, it shows in 'Created' status with 'complete installation'. Those are removed 24hrs later so as not to confuse members. Now let's look at the hardware agent. When your hardware agent was prepared and ready to ship, an email containing the word 'Activation' would have been sent to you. That email contains all of the information you need to know how to connect your agent and activate it into your account. I think you are missing this email as it explains how to get it up and running and activated into your account. Without this information, you might end up going down the path you have. Reset does not do anything on the agents, we disable them because people have trashed their agents by pressing buttons without knowing what they mean. Since you see a single solid LED on, it means the agent is running as it should be, it's just waiting to be activated into your account. Let's see if we can take care of that first then we can try to solve what's going on with any software agents you might have created. First, can you post the agent ID of the hardware please. There is a white sticker on the side of the hardware agent, please share that number.

You announced a few weeks ago that you were stopping logging beyond your provider outages. I’m still getting these. Have you not done this yet or do I need to upgrade my agents first? Hi, no we've not removed those yet. It seems some want to know about beyond problems even if it is only informational. The notice was eventually taken down. Many of the outages I am seeing by getting emails are not being logged in the dashboard. Is this because they are very short duration? The ones that are logged are usually in Denver 10 hops away, which is not of any concern. Do you mean specifically outages or Inactive and maybe Disconnected emails? The emails will specify if the event is only known as Inactive or Disconnected unless there is specifically an IP outage. If there is no IP outage, the emails won't mention outages. You can control those emails from the Notifications menu if you don't want to know about Inactive.

Got an email with this subject. Agent number is not shown in my agents – I believe it refers to a software agent that I removed a long time ago. But not sure how to tell. Says it will be removed in 30 days. Yes, it would mean there is an old report being removed. I'll mention this to development because as you mention, you had deleted the agent, therefore, should not have received a notice about it. The notice is for those who have not deleted and may want to re-install it. Hardware agent has been installed and working except it didn't report an outage that we had (about 20 minutes) a few days ago There are many conditions which can cause loss of Internet access which aren't actually IP outages. Meaning, not all loss of Internet access are TCP/IP AKA routing based problems but other things. OutagesIO is built to mainly monitor IP outages with your provider but often, it's what you don't see that tells the story. If you don't see IP based outages (logged outages in your reports) but you do experience loss of Internet access or obviously low speeds, the first step is to check everything in your own location to make sure nothing is failing such as a cable, dust in Ethernet connectors, the most basic things. What OutagesIO cannot monitor are signal levels with cable and wireless providers/devices for example but when we're seeing loss of Internet access without outages, that's what is telling us that there are other problems to dig into or ask the provider about. One great method to use is to find some neighbors that might use the service too. This way, you can compare and correlate your reported loss of Internet access and other findings so that even mystery problems become more obvious. That said, we are working on another report that will show specifically non outage (IP) based loss of Internet access to help in exactly these situations.

Hi, Perhaps it was yourself that asked about this via email and you were given the price of $40.00 which was a mistake. Asking the right person gave a price of $15.00 to the Phillipines. We don't have pricing for some countries because the shipping costs are sometimes too high and most people aren't interested. If you would like to order, please reply to the person that sent you that email and I'm sure they will work with you. Thank you for using OutagesIO.

Hi, Yes, that is very strange since the mail services would be the same for both the OCP service and these forums. We know that all Microsoft services are constantly blocking our emails or sending them to spam. They could care less about smaller companies as we have tried to contact them and to work with them on countless occasions yet they keep doing this. It is an unjust action to our members because we absolutely do not spam. Every single email we send out even includes an unsubscribe and all correct DNS and other measures. We are very aware that a blacklisting service called UCEPROTECTL3 keeps putting entire ASN's in their blacklist and that no one seems to have been able to do much about this yet. What happens is that if one single mail server does something that is considered spam, this service blacklists not only this server but the entire IP range that this server is part of which effectively blocks countless other mail servers. Then they request payment to be removed. We suspect that companies like Microsoft owned mail services are using this service and so we and countless other mail servers and up with problems that affect our members. By the way, one other thing that keeps happening is people sign up to the service and sometimes when they leave it, rather than disabling their notifications, they flag them as spam with their mail service which effectively prevents others from getting their notifications too. I'm sorry that this is happening and we do not seem to have any control over it. Only members of those services can change things by complaining to their mail providers. All I can suggest is that you send an email to noreply@outagesio.com from your mail service so that it will whitelist the domain. Can you give that a try and we'll go from there.

Hi, Other than pings and information about the agent communicating, nothing will show up until there are actual events. Can you share the agent ID and I'll take a look to make sure everything looks ok.

@terichardson Hi Tom, This is a copy of the email reply we already sent :). Some parts were added after the email being sent. Let me try to answer some of your questions. why is having an account with you not enough to be registered in the support forum? - The www web site is a wordpress information site. The app.outagesio.com web site is a custom application we write and these forums are yet another software type. There is no way to unify accounts across the different platforms though it is something we've been trying to achieve and eventually will. I had installed an agent back an May and have only been sporadically checking it. It's been disconnected several times, the last time in June. I went to the dashboard and clicked on a link that I thought would reconnect the agent. The link went away but I saw no indication that anything had happened. If the agent was in Disconnected status, then it means it was no longer communicating for some reason. Most of the time, it's because of some other software on the PC that conflicts so the service has to be restarted. There is no way to 'restart' an agent from the dashboard because it's installed on the PC. It has to be restarted on the PC through the services or a reboot. If your previous agent was extended, we would be happy to extend your new one. I'll pass this on to the dev that takes care of this and you'll see it change as soon as he looks into this. In terms of documentation, it's been an ongoing struggle trying to find a way to maintain accurate and up to date information and is why we have the 'about this page' links in most of the application pages. Just click on those when you are on a certain page and it will pop open a new tab to the information for that page. We try to keep those up to date so if you find something that doesn't match what you're seeing, by all means, please let us know. UPDATE since sending; We see that none of your agents were deleted and the one you paid for is still there but it looks like you may have re-installed onto the same PC which might explain why you are seeing it as Disconnected and it will eventually get removed by the system. Make sure you only have one agent installed on the PC and we can go from there.

@jjuly Hi, Yes, you definitely have some problems both with the provider and beyond. As you said, beyond are informational but it doesn't mean they cannot be used. I also notice that most of the problems are when you might be using the service especially if you work from home. Most are around the 10am to 3 pm and the next high is around 8pm If you have not been able to get them to fix the problems, that's one thing but if they have admitted they know and cannot fix it, that's another. Let's assume they aren't fixing the problems and you've reported it multiple times. I'll also make the assumption that they aren't taking your facts/findings seriously. In this sort of case, you should try to find one, two, more, neighbors that would be willing to install agents too. You can make the case that if you can show the proof you need, everyone will end up with better services. Some providers count on the fact that most people will simply suck it up and go away. They aren't going to make costly repairs unless there is something affecting their bottom line. However, if you can get others to join you, you can then show your correlated proof on their social pages. It's easy to dismiss one person but it's a whole lot harder when many people are complaining. If they remove your posts, you could always talk to the city, find someone to listen to you, show them what you have and see if someone higher up will help make a case for you. If most of the problems are with the providers upstream, you could try to reach them on social media as well. And of course, we'll be happy to help decipher the data to help you. In this day and age, as everything we do is being moved onto the Internet, there are no excuses for ongoing unreliable services.

Hi, Thanks for posting your question. Here is what I see and with more information maybe we can figure out what is going on. [image: 1630945903297-new-agents-become-inactive-2-still-active-4-total.png] First, we need to eliminate 128292 because it isn't properly installed. From what I can see it looks like it was working, then you re-installed it and that installation never completed. What ever machine you installed this one on, you will need to make sure there aren't two agents installed on that same machine because we have seen cases where this can happen. If you have two, just remove both from the PC then use the re-install function in the agent's dashboard to re-install it. Next, I notice that all of these agents are in the Philippines which is fine but I see them all at the same address, all using the same provider. Is it safe for me to assume that you are trying to use OutagesIO to not only monitor the Internet service but also different LAN segments? Meaning, perhaps you have an agent installed on different floors and each as its our routing switch. Next, I need to understand what you mean by 'active' agents. Agents only go into another status based on if they can reach the OutagesIO network or not. As long as the agent software is running on the PC, does have the correct firewall rules, then it should be able to run normally. As you mention, those things are fine on the PC but it sounds like there is something else on the network that might be preventing some of the agents from communicating correctly. If you search for 'statuses' or 'inactive' on this support site, you'll find several explanations of what the different statuses mean. In the most basic sense, Inactive means the agent wasn't able to reach the OutagesIO network for around 20 seconds or more. If you see Disconnected, this means it's been at least a half hour. If all of these agents are on the same network, then you'll see different things potentially. Until I know more about how you are using all four and why they are in the same building, I'll have to wait to continue.

Hi, We received the email at support as well and re-sent the activation email. We don't see a bounce so it must be in your spam box or it was blocked by your mail service. If that is the case, please be sure to whitelist the domains so that you don't miss out on any important emails while using the service. Hope you received it by the time this reply was sent :).

Hi, Our agents run on Windows, Linux, Raspberry and other devices. We don't have an agent for Android. We tested quite a bit and it was pretty much impossible to do it so that folks could get quick alerts and it used up the battery very quickly since it's constantly using the network and consequently, data. However, you can install the agent on a PC/Laptop that you'll keep on at the location you'd like to monitor and can log into the control panel to view your reports using any mobile. Hope this helps.

@markl Hi there, This post seems to have been missed. The choice is really up to you. There isn't anything to hack on the agents but as usual, when you put something directly on the Internet, it becomes a target for hackers. Yes, absolutely, you could install another little router outside the MSP's device then connect your agent to that so long as the upstream is providing DHCP. Let me know if you have any more questions, I'm sorry this was missed and happy to help in any way we can.