How much packet loss is normal?
- by Fabian
I started monitoring our network using SmokePing. Users occasionally complain about bad network connections, but the problems went away after some minutes usually. I now wanted to get some more quantitative information about those problems.
SmokePing regularly pings servers inside our network, in a connected network and outside hosts. I only have a limited amount of control over our internal network and none at all for the connection to the outside and to the second network.
I now see quite often (2-4 times a day) that packets to the second network and the outside are dropped. Most of the times it is 1-2 packets out of 20, sometimes more. Inside our internal network no packets are dropped.
Is this an expected amount of packet loss, or does it indicate that something is wrong? I'm mainly wondering if I should bother the university IT department about it, or if I should just accept it as it is.
