“The internet is down” is three different failures wearing one coat. Three monitors that cost nothing will tell you which one you actually have — in one glance.
When the office shouts “internet band hai”, the fault is in one of three places: your own network, your ISP's path, or DNS — and each has a completely different fix and a completely different person responsible. One ping monitor cannot separate them. Three can. This guide builds the classic trio inside Uptime Kuma: the gateway check, the public anchor check, and the DNS check — plus how to read their combined pattern like a diagnosis, and how Kuma's history becomes your evidence when the ISP claims nothing is wrong.
👆 Tape this table next to the phone. It ends most “internet down” arguments in under a minute.
Add a Ping monitor for your router's LAN address — commonly 192.168.1.1 or 192.168.0.1; use your actual gateway address. This check never leaves your building, so it answers the most basic question: is our own network alive? If this fails, stop blaming the ISP — check the router's power, the switch, and the cable between them. Give it brisk settings; local checks are cheap and fast.
Add a second Ping monitor for a stable public address out on the internet — your ISP's own DNS server is a poetic choice, or a public anycast resolver address such as 1.1.1.1. This check must cross your router and your ISP's network to succeed. Gateway up, anchor down is the signature of a WAN/ISP failure: your building is fine, the road out is broken. That single distinction decides whether you reboot your router or open a complaint ticket — and it is visible before anyone picks up the phone.
The sneakiest failure: the connection works, but names stop resolving, so every website “is down” while every ping succeeds. Uptime Kuma's DNS monitor type catches it directly: give it a hostname (your own website is a fine choice), record type A, and optionally a specific DNS server to ask. When this monitor alone goes red, users will swear the internet is dead — and you will know it is “only” DNS, fixable by switching the resolver, while the connection itself never dropped.
Run these monitors from a wired (Ethernet) connection. If the Kuma machine itself is on Wi-Fi, its own wireless drops pollute every reading and your “ISP failures” may just be your shelf's weak signal. Then let the history accumulate: Uptime Kuma's per-monitor uptime percentage and timeline is exactly the evidence an ISP support desk cannot argue with. “Your line dropped eleven times this week, here are the timestamps” ends the “no fault found at our end” conversation faster than any amount of shouting.
Offices with a broadband plus a 4G failover link get one extra layer: the anchor check proves a path works, not that the primary path works — failover can hide a dead main line for weeks while everyone complains the connection “feels slow”. If your router supports it, pin a second anchor check through the primary link, or at minimum schedule a weekly manual look at the router's WAN status. Monitoring that cannot see a silent failover is only half finished.
Watch the video for the full Uptime Kuma walkthrough — then add these three monitors and never argue about an internet outage blind again.
▶️ Watch Full VideoYour ISP's DNS server is ideal because it tests the path you actually depend on. A public anycast address like 1.1.1.1 also works well and is answered from many locations. Avoid random websites as anchors — their own downtime would masquerade as your ISP's failure.
That is the DNS signature. The road is open, the signposts are gone. Check the DNS monitor in this setup, try switching one PC temporarily to a public resolver, and if names start resolving, fix the resolver setting on the router or server rather than rebooting the whole network.
It gives you the strongest evidence a small office can produce: timestamped records showing your gateway alive while the public anchor failed, repeatedly. ISPs take dated, repeated logs seriously in a way they never take “it was slow on Tuesday” — keep the Kuma history and quote it on the ticket.