A valuable capability that organizations using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure have available is internet intelligence. This capability allows you to monitor the health and accessibility of your web site’s or web application’s host – from over 30 locations across the world. You enter the IP address of the host and the internet intelligence feature uses its global network of internet sensors to ping the host and it reports the observed latencies.
“IP Troubleshooting provides network reachability tools that utilize external global vantage points to help users quickly assess the availability and performance of any externally facing endpoints. IP Troubleshooting enables operations and support teams the ability to diagnose performance and availability issues for any endpoint IP address on the internet.”
As an example, I will check on google.com. I am currently in Wellington, New Zealand. When I ping google.com:
That gives us the IP address: 172.217.167.78.
Now I open the OCI dashboard.
Click on Edge Services | Internet Intelligence.
Enter the IP address in the area IP Troubleshooting.
Now press Run Test.
A map of the world will appear. After several dozens of seconds, all members of the global sensor network have reported in what their experiences are with this IP Address:
In this case interestingly enough the IP address seems related to a host somewhere in the US. This US host is extremely well accessible from Australia (green dots) and far less so from the US. The internet intelligence bots in Europe and Africa have a hard time accessing this host. Presumably, when you access google.com from those locations, it will resolve to a different IP address.
I have used this capability on the server hosting our technology blog. And we seem to have a problem – that I was not aware of until now:
Get the IP address for our blog host: 178.20.253.78.
Now run the internet intelligence check:
Clearly, this does not look good. I am not sure how to interpret the gray dots – but they do not look good. And the orange dots in Brazil, India and China are not reassuring either. Note: if you experience poor response times with our blog, please let me know in a comment on this article.
Note: I can check trace route details for requests from each of the sensors, checking all hubs and providers.
More details are available on the providers that play a role in handling requests to the host:
Resources
Oracle Dyn: Internet Intelligence – https://dyn.com/internet-intelligence/
Oracle OCI Docs on Internet Intelligence: https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/iaas/Content/II/Concepts/overview.htm
