We have been having trouble with our home internet for years. Lately it just drops off every hour or two for a few minutes at a time. I wrote a little script to ping a remote site every minute and log the results. The plan was I could graph the results and “share” them with my internet provider.
I was logging from my desktop Raspberry Pi 4 running Ubuntu and realized it would be better to used a dedicated, wired machine, lest my internet provider protest that the problem is with my router, etc.
I had this $5 Raspberry Pi Zero that I bought not realizing I actually wanted a Raspberry Pi Zero W with built in WiFi. I figured I could use this as a dedicated machine hooked directly to my router. I bought a USB to Ethernet adapter and a USB cable for power, that I just plugged into the USB slot in my router.
Amazing how fast it came together. Going to clean up the software a bit and post it to github. Will post when it is out there.
Steven A. Guccione 
Excellent job!. I did the same exact thing to gather evidence against my ISP, being frustrated with occasional drops. I was so sure that it was their site being at fault; however, this project showed that the fault was with me and a near-dead modem.
I have about ten of these guys controlling aspects of my daily life.
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We are on our third modem this summer. Thinking of trying a DOCSIS 3.1 now. I have been doing network traces and am pretty sure it is an upstream node.
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