Internet speed monitoring tool?

[dawindmg08]

Hi all,

(apologies if this is the wrong forum for this, please point me elsewhere if you think there's a better forum for this question).

I'm looking for recommendations on software that can monitor my internet connection at the office, something that can track our speeds all day and log the results. We have terrible AT&T service at our office and we rarely hit our promised speeds (20/1) and also have several dropouts during the day where things slow to a crawl. I would love to have solid stats to show to them to prove what's happening and hopefully troubleshoot a better solution for us. Either their equipment or connection sucks or there are some major problems in our building...

Ideally it's an OS X app I can run on on one of our hardwired Macs. Or if it's possible with any of the built-in Utilities I would love to know about that too!

TIA,
D

 

[solaris]

Running Speedtest.net in Terminal, with looping and logging to text file, might be an idea.

You need the Speedtest Python script. Grab it and make executable:

wget -O speedtest-cli https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest_cli.py
chmod +x speedtest-cli

Create a bash script to run speedtest-cli in loop every 30 minutes (1800 seconds).

nano speedtest

Paste:

while true; do
  date
  speedtest-cli
  sleep 1800
done

Make the script executable:

chmod +x speedtest

Run script and log to dated file:

./speedtest > Speedtest_log_`date +%Y.%m.%d`.txt

Control + z to kill.

It should output something like this:

Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from Bayonette AS...
Selecting best server based on latency...
Hosted by DataGuard AS (Oslo) [4.12 km]: 3.089 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 361.92 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 259.72 Mbit/s

 

[dawindmg08]

Thanks for this. Is this CPU intensive, running in the background? I'd want to keep it running all day.

 

[solaris]

It shouldn't be too CPU intensive, but it will use all your free bandwidth. Hence I suggest you run it at a set interval and not continuously.

 

[dawindmg08]

Okay thanks. I'll have to wait for a day when I'm alone at the office, as even Speedtest can throttle our speed so badly that no one can connect or even check email while it's running...