I’ve been able to build a better map of one particular subnet of Blizzard systems on AT&T’s enterprise hosting network (which is where Blizzard’s gaming servers are hosted but on a different subnet) in addition to monitoring several systems within my ISP, and using SNMP for key systems on my own network. Since AT&T’s edge routers and the gateway to the gaming servers drop ICMP requests, I’m polling connectivity to these systems (like the Battle.net chat server and the ingress point for the actual game servers) using their service ports.
The main reason I’m doing this is I basically want to quickly see if the latency spikes I’m seeing are near me; like I’ll be able to see if it’s my router/firewall (which is my unix based Mini), the cable modem, packet loss after that between me and say the ISP’s name server, something external upstream of my ISP, something closer to AT&T enterprise hosting, an issue isolated closer to their chat/gaming servers). Here is an image of my map… (ignore the msec times, they are all wrong)
Regardless, this is still by all means, not perfect because of the inability to actually ping anything within the game server subnet (which provides better clarity when it comes to being able to log actual packet loss at a basic level). Losing connectivity to the service port will still be useful if the systems on the 12.120.152 network also go into a warning state due to higher percentage of packet loss around the same time (otherwise, it could just be that the actual service went down which naturally everyone would simultaneously know and flood the forums with).
BTW, when playing in co-op, the clear indication that an issue is on Blizzard’s side is when everyone in that game is affected. In cases where one person disconnects/lags while everyone else is able to continue along fine, that is one of those scenarios where it is isolated to that one particular player. When I posted about my character de-syncing a week ago, several other folks who were playing together or solo also noted they all had in-game issues which would point to something server side. This is still anecdotal evidence though and/or could be isolated to just a few of the actual game servers which our particular games resided on at the time.
Anyway, the software is also logging all events such that over time, I’ll be able to get a better picture as to what might be causing these recent lag spikes on my end.
