AppBITS: Online Check Reports Internet Outages
Internet connectivity is a requirement for getting my work done. That’s seldom a problem, but we’ve occasionally suffered from spates of flaky connectivity over the years. Squirrels once chewed some of the cable leading to our house, our AirPort Extreme base stations’ reliability degraded over time, and we’ve needed several cable modem replacements. In each of these cases, the connection would vary between working fine, being slow, and dropping entirely, and it often took days to realize that something was going on enough to call for support or investigate hardware upgrades.
The next time something messes with our Internet connection, I hope to realize sooner, thanks to a little Mac utility I’ve been running for several months. Sindre Sorhus’s Online Check is a free $4 menu bar utility that does one thing: report when your Internet connection drops or returns. [When I downloaded the app on 28 August 2024, it was free, and because I had already downloaded it, its page in the App Store app showed an Open button rather than a price. Mea culpa! –Adam]
When you’re online, Online Check checks to see if you have connectivity every 10 seconds; if the connection drops, it checks to see if connectivity has returned every 2 seconds. Both of those values are configurable up to 999 seconds. It first checks apple.com, and if that fails, it checks cloudflare.com.
If the connection drops, Online Check turns its menu bar icon (a simple dot or globe icon) red and triggers a macOS notification. It can also optionally trigger a shortcut that can do anything you can create in Apple’s Shortcuts app; an example shortcut displays a different sort of notification. If you can access multiple Wi-Fi networks, you might appreciate another downloadable shortcut that can switch to another Wi-Fi network if the current one goes offline. When connectivity returns, the system notification tells you how long you were offline.
That’s it, apart from a History window that shows a log of all the events since the last app launch. I’d like to see Online Check maintain the history across launches for better troubleshooting of intermittent problems over time, and the developer is considering it. If you’d like that too, send feedback.
Don’t worry about Online Check slowing down your Mac—it consumes minimal resources. Since my last reboot 13 days ago, it has used just under 4 minutes of CPU time (compared to, say, Google Drive, which has munched over 31 hours of CPU time) and has sent and received just 55 KB of data.
Overall, Online Check is the very definition of a one-trick pony, but its proactive notifications and minimal resource usage make it a sufficiently helpful trick that I recommend it to anyone curious about the stability of their Internet connection.
I’ve been tracking network up/down for several years. I use NetworkLogger Pro which does support history across launches. It also supports legacy versions of macOS. But it’s not free ($20).
For those who want simplicity this seems like a great product.
I just went to get Online Check from the MAS and it shows $4.00, not a lot, but not free. Even on the webpage you have linked, it shows it as a paid app. Has it changed since you first got it and now is not free?
At the very bottom of the page, there’s a download for the non app store version of the app but it says it does not update automatically:
Yes, and the app store version is 1.3.0.
Correct but I don’t think there is any major difference except that the 1.2.0 is free without automatic updates and only is changed once a year.
It’s a similar model to what UTM does: the app store version costs $9.99 and gets automatic updates where the free version for the non app store one does not.
But in any event, $4.00 is not an issue. You can spend almost that much getting a large coffee at Starbucks or McDonald’s.
Oh boy! Finally, a replacement for my resurrected but again aging BwanaDik!
$5.00CDN in the AppStore for me.
All - If you’re looking for a better tool that does have long-term logging I recommend Ping. Ping offers to check multiple URLs, put a warning in the menu bar by coloring the icon green/yellow/red and has kept a log of every ping since the day I installed it. It’s on the Mac App Store at Ping • Uptime Monitor on the Mac App Store
Terrific tool. Free, works perfectly and far more flexible than Online Check (with due respect to that developer - I know these things require a lot of work). I recommend Ping (I have no affiliation with the developer) without hesitation.
Wow, I am so sorry for missing the addition of a price. Online Check was free when I got it on August 28, as you can see in the screenshot below, and nothing on its page suggested that anything had changed. I did look at it on the Mac App Store while writing, but because I had already purchased it, I just saw an Open button.
I’ll update the article and check out Ping.
Looks like Ping is a bit different. It’s free for checking three sites, but as far as I can tell, logging requires the $12.99 Ping Pro (at least, I don’t see anything associated with logging in what I just downloaded). Plus, I’m not seeing alerts at all—just menu bar icon changes.
Thanks for double checking that. It’s been a long time since I purchased or installed it so I did not remember that it cost anything. Maybe it didn’t when I installed it?
Regarding the Alerts, I have found that the changing color of the icon and the menu bar is sufficient. It is persistent and immediately gets my attention. If you prefer to receive a pop-up notification, then the other app may be more to your liking. It’s good to have choices, right?
It very well may have changed, just like Online Check. I finally figured out how to determine what you’ve bought from Apple, when you bought it, and for how much. Go to https://reportaproblem.apple.com/ and it will give you a chronological list of all your purchases.
Plus it runs on ancient hardware (my 11-year old MacBook running Big Sur).
This has long been a pet peeve of mine. How many times have I suggested a certain app to somebody and wanted to briefly look up what it costs, only to find out that I cannot check that because I had already purchased said app. There’s got to be a better (yet still simple/quick) way to do this.
I wonder if the version 7 of iStat Menus can do it. I mean, version 6 can tell you if your network is connected or not, but version 7 adds “events” that you can take action on.
(What I’m hoping for with version 7 is the ability to use iStat Menus to replace the no-longer-supported Hardware Growler. I suggested to Bjango it would be a good feature.)
Also, what we, and by “we” I mean everyone really needs is a tool that diagnoses network issues. So you can’t reach Tidbits. Does that mean that you have no network at all? Only local network (e.g. to your router)? Do you have a WAN connection? Is your DNS down? Is DNS returning the wrong address? Is the site you’re reaching down? Is it a HTTPS certificate issue? Is it routing? Is your upstream or downstream bandwidth saturated? Do you need to reboot the router? Does your device have the wrong IP address? Is the site IPV6 only? Is it a firewall problem? A proxy server issue?
Yes it can. I just set it up - I get a banner alert when the internet goes out, and again when it reconnects.
This is golden!
The link at the very bottom of the page for version 1.20 does not indicate that it’s a paid version as you would have had to pay first before downloading. When checking the About this software in the app itself, it does not indicate that is is a shareware or paid app so I assume that the Apple Store version is the paid one which is only one version ahead of the other one.
Still using BwanaDik for this and have been for many years, and it is still donation ware.
For whatever it’s worth, the app is currently listed for $5.00 in the US App Store.
There is: use the ‘Fnd’ search service. If you have DuckDuckGo as your default search engine, you can simply put
!fnd search termin your browser’s address bar. If not, go to fnd.io. Here’s an example of the app detail page for Online Check. You can easily change which country’s store listing you’re looking at, too, if you want to see pricing in different locations.Can you tell us how to set that up? I’ve been looking at the V7 UI and documentation and can’t figure it out. Thanks!
I have a “home monitor” Mac, for running Indigo among other things.
I would like it to have log of downtime periods, because I also have intermittent fails.
I’ll write a simple bash script to check a couple of sites and record changes in a file.
I’ll probably have it launch every minute from corn.
When I’ve tested and polished it, I’ll post it here.
Hmmm, it I check the ping times, I could also track slloowwnneess.
Thanks for the!
Here is a screenshot. I’ve opened the Alerts section; it’s the first rule, pointed at by the red arrow.
Thanks, very helpful! I just set it up.
I wonder why the app is no longer free? The developer’s FAQ (while answering a slightly different question) says “I make apps because I enjoy it. Your money is of no interest to me.”
I do use iStat Menus (great for a variety of reasons) and didn’t set up those notifications because of those provided by Ping. It occurred to me that I wasn’t really clear about why I was using Ping and in particular the commercial version. Ping doesn’t just monitor your connection, it monitors any connection.
I’ve been running a business that depends on customers connecting to multiple sites for information, to submit API calls, etc. Knowing when any of them were offline or slowing down significantly helped prevent a lot of customer complaints. I had six sites set up in Ping and if any one of them had a problem a notification would appear on my screen. It can also be set up to send SMS and/or emails under certain circumstances.
Since selling that business I no longer need that level of monitoring but it was a one-time license so I still use it to monitor apple.com, cloudflare.com and google.com just for fun. For $12 it’s a pretty good deal. I do have the iStat menus set up now, too, and appreciate @ddmiller pointing that out.
I wondered about that. But it seemed like I would find it useful, and the price also seems fair, so I got it. As long as it doesn’t do anything untoward in the background which is always my main concern.
I wonder if it was a typo or a glitch or something. I just visited the App Store page and it seems to be free now:
That’s a different app as the others were referring to the one in the first post:
As I mentioned earlier, there was a link to a download of a previous version but the link is gone now.