Connection Stability Monitor
Watch a connection over time and catch the stalls a speed test never sees.
Run the test
Each sample is a real HTTP request to the nearest Cloudflare edge, with the response read in full. It is not an ICMP ping: it includes the server’s own handling time and stops at the edge rather than reaching any particular destination.
Where this comes from
A request every second for forty seconds, plotted as it goes. This exists because the complaint it addresses — "my internet keeps dropping" — is almost never visible in a speed test, which runs once and reports an average. What people are describing is usually a median that looks fine with occasional samples several times worse, or brief runs of failed requests. Both show up immediately in a sample-by-sample trace and in no single measurement, which is why the chart is the output and the numbers are the summary.
What the results mean
- Spikes
- Samples at three times the median or worse. Measured relative to your own connection, since a spike on fibre is a normal sample on satellite.
- Consecutive failures
- Two or more failed requests in a row means the connection genuinely dropped rather than slowed.
- Steady
- No spikes, no drops and low jitter. If problems persist, they are on a leg of the path beyond the edge or on your own network under load.
- The trace
- Each bar is one request. Patterns matter more than any single bar — regular spikes suggest something on a schedule, random ones suggest interference.
Common problems and fixes
- Spikes every few seconds on Wi-Fi
- Interference or airtime contention. Move to 5 GHz, away from other radios, and compare against a cable — the difference tells you which it is.
- A drop at a regular interval
- Something on a schedule: a device waking, a backup, a router doing housekeeping. Regularity is the clue that it is not the line.
- It looks fine here and my game still lags
- This measures to a nearby edge. A game server three countries away sits behind hops this never touches, and one of them can be the problem.
- Everything failed after I switched tabs
- Browsers throttle background tabs hard. Keep this one in front for the whole run or the samples measure the throttling.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my internet drop out briefly?
The usual causes look identical in a speed test and different in a trace. Wi-Fi interference produces scattered spikes; a device or a backup on a schedule produces regular ones; a failing line or a congested one produces clusters of failures. Running this for a minute while the problem happens gives you a shape rather than an adjective, which is also what a provider needs to act.
How long should I run it for?
The default forty seconds is enough to catch a frequent problem. For something intermittent, run it while the problem is actually happening — a clean run at a quiet moment proves nothing about eight o'clock in the evening.
Is this the same as a speed test?
No. A speed test measures how much data fits down the line and takes seconds to do it. This measures whether the line is consistently there, which is what actually breaks calls, games and video — and which an average by definition hides.
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