Advancing the Art of Internet Edge Outage Detection
Philipp Richter, Ramakrishna Padmanabhan, Neil T. Spring, Arthur Berger, David Draper Clark · 2018
Measuring reliability of edge networks in the Internet is difficult due to the size and heterogeneity of networks, the rarity of outages, and the difficulty of finding vantage points that can accurately capture such events at scale. In this paper, we use logs from a major CDN, detailing hourly request counts from address blocks. We discovered that in many edge address blocks, devices, collectively, contact the CDN every hour over weeks and months. We establish that a sudden temporary absence of these requests indicates a loss of Internet connectivity of those address blocks, events we call disruptions.