Check online status, find out and identify any connection issues quickly.
Beacon Echo pings your gateway, a couple of internet hosts and whatever else you point it at periodically on macOS - see below for iPhone/iPad -, tells you when a layer breaks and keeps record of everything. Every drop gets logged with start, end and duration, next to whatever changed on the network at the time. Runs in the Mac menu bar and on iPhone and iPad.
macOS 14+ · iOS / iPadOS 17+ · No account · No tracking
Per-layer status
Can guess which layer failed
Targets are grouped into LAN, WAN and DNS (you can override or provide your own).
Status shows the first layer that fails, and that’s what you see in the menu bar, notifications, the outage log and exports. Add Layer Checks drops in your gateway and a DNS lookup in one click.
WAN down · LAN ok (2 ms)Gateway answers, upstream doesn’t. That’s on the ISP.DNS failing · WAN okPackets get out, names don’t resolve. Swap resolvers.Degraded — Slow: 180 ms averageUp, but slow, lossy or partly down. You set the thresholds.OnlineAll layers answer.
What an outage looks like
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06:02:18
WAN down · LAN ok
The gateway still answers in 5.5 ms, both upstream hosts time out. The icon goes red and the outage timer starts.
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06:04:23 · 2m 5s later
Connection’s back
Once the connection is reestablished, you can review exact times and how long each layer was down, plus which targets stopped replying.
Wi-Fi roams, IP and gateway changes and VPN up/down land in the same log, so you see what happened right before. Filter, sort, export to CSV or JSON.
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Any time after
Pull a report
A Markdown report with connection details, per-target stats for the last hour, and every outage and network change from the last 24 hours. It’s your record of when and how the network was down.
IPs, SSID and MACs are masked by default.
Latency
One line per target over 15 min, 1 h or 24 h, failed checks marked. Min/avg/p95/max, jitter and loss for each. The last 24 h survive a restart.
Alerts & webhooks
Alerts fire only after a problem lasts a few rounds in a row (1–10, your call), so one dropped packet won’t wake you up. If everything goes down you get one “Network down”, not one per target, and later “Back online after 2m 5s”. The same events can go out as webhooks: ntfy, Home Assistant, Slack, Discord or plain JSON to your own endpoint.
Checks & targets
Paste whatever you’ve got: 1.1.1.1, nas.local:445, https://example.com/health, dns:apple.com@1.1.1.1. Beacon Echo works out the check type and layer.
Ping is proper ICMP, no helper or admin password needed. TCP times the handshake for hosts that drop ICMP, DNS queries go to the resolver, so a cached answer can’t fake a pass. HTTPS checks keep an eye on and warn about cert expiry.
Every target comes with the matching ping, dig, nc or curl line if you want to double-check from Terminal. Each network can have its own target list, switched automatically when you join it.
In the menu bar
Pick a radar dish, a lighthouse or a plain status light. Green is up, yellow degraded, red down. It animates once per check round, so you can tell it’s still running. Hover it for every target’s last result.
iPhone & iPad
Same checks, layers, logs, charts and reports, in four tabs: Status, Targets, Alerts and Settings.
iOS won’t let anything poll continuously in the background. Beacon Echo runs live while it’s open and for a short while after you switch away, then does quick check bursts whenever iOS hands out background time, alerts and webhooks included. How often that happens is up to iOS and Background App Refresh.