Hello!
Ive just started to use this really amazing software the Dude, but Ive been struggling to setup a service which checks and monitors the internet connection to the network computers I manage using The Dude, if such thing is possible.
Its especially important for one of the computers, where an application waits to recieve a package over the internet and to import it into database. The thing is, very often something wrong happens but there is no log and no way to know what went wrong. So i need to know if and when and for how long internet went down.
Maybe its simple to set it up, but it seems i cant figure it out. Please help! 
We have The Dude set up to monitor many different things (services, network equipment and link throughput, etc) and as you say it is a great bit of software. We monitor the internet connectivity a couple of different ways. 1. From our main site we ping our gateway router. 2. From our main site we do a DNS query on an internet based DNS server for our MX record. 3. We have a WAN link to a remote site and at that site we have a Dude agent and a home-grade ADSL connection - we use the agent to ping and test our outward facing systems at our main site, by going out the ADSL link and through the internet to our main site.
You can test just about anything you want - just a matter of working out how.
Akami hosts about everything on the internet, you can probe them with http to find out if the internet connection is working… Or google etc…
