Change address used for watchdog connection check

Is it possible to change the address that is used for the watchdog connection check? I am in the UAE and I feel like its cycling the connection occasionally when it doesn’t need too perhaps because ping request taking too long and would like to pick something closer to location than weather.gov.

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Hello and welcome!

The watchdog checks use multiple sites to validate Internet connectivity, weather.gov is only one of the sites used. If that can’t be reached the next site checked is wmo.int to account for geo diversity in our customer locations.

However, checking the most recent IP geolocation for wmo.int it seems the server may now be located in California, USA (either due a hosting provider change or recently implementing geo local CDNs) which no longer makes it geo diverse. It looks like home.cern may be a better choice with high availability to use in the Watchdog check. Can you let me know what your observed latency to home.cern is? Thank you!

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I get a faster reply actually from wmo.int than home.cern actually as it looks like closest server for home.cern for me is in Switzerland.

Why use these sites and not use something like google dns server or cloudflare dns to ping instead? Surely cloudflare would guarantee better geo availability and uptime.

Yes, that is correct home.cern is hosted in Switzerland which would be approx. 5500 miles closer to the UAE than the most recent California IP I was seeing for wmo.int. If the latency to home.cert is worse It’s possible wmo.int may now be leveraging a content delivery network which provides appropriate geo-local routing close to the UAE. Can you provide the IP address that wmo.int resolves to for you? This would help confirm this theory.

To answer your question, the WatchDog checks are holistic in nature providing a validation of connectivity that is close to what an actual user would experience when attempting to access the internet vs. a simple ping test. Most simple ping test “watch dog” functions that attempt to reach public DNS servers do not provide an accurate picture of real Internet connectivity across modern networks due to myriad issues including but not limited to the network dropping ICMP traffic, diverse routing of ping tests depending on their origin, payload size etc.

To focus on the immediate issue you are experiencing, can you provide a screenshot of your WatchDog Action Log after the most recent connection cycling so we can assist in troubleshooting further? It would also be good to get a screenshot of Modem Info (when not logged into the modem so that sensitive info will remain redacted) and Live Signal screens so we can review signal metrics as well.

If your latency to wmo.int is good when testing interactively then it is not immediately clear why the connection cycling performed by the IG WatchDog would be a false positive; depending on the connection quality it may actually be finding an active connectivity issue which it is correcting for. If not, the logs may help us in identifying some additional turning we can make to the WatchDog that could further improve its behavior.

Thank you!

I ended up just turning off the watchdog service and connection seems stable now. It would be nice if watchdog service was configurable to select if you want the more in depth check or if you want just a simple ping check etc.

Thank you for the feedback, we will take it into consideration! Also, as a reminder, the WatchDog check interval can be increased to 15 or 30 minutes for connections with stability issues which usually helps with connections on higher latency etc.