Network Monitoring EA/ Indicator Request

Hi all, Need help!

Problem I'm trying to solve: Allow MT4 traders to monitor live all the available Datacenter connectivity quality. The current MT4 automated functions only check to connect to the best connection on the first startup. Thereafter, the trader needs to manually rescan if there is better connectivity.
This tools will allow the trader who is very sensitive the trade delay to monitor the quality of the connection (ping + packet loss) and traders can decide whether to proceed to enter the trade with latency.

Automation on the scanning of DC, reconnection, email alert will be good.
The minimum requirement is to at least enter all parameters manually and allow live monitoring of the quality across all DCs.

I've already found an external tool that works very close to what I need, but hopefully, it can be built as an EA. (see attachment).

Do PM me with a simple mockup, timeline and price if you're able to build this.

A tool able of doing what you want wouldn't be very useful. Monitoring network connectivity of a strategy/an EA is not a trivial task.

(1) If you trade from a local machine (from home/office) there is no need to monitor connectivity as your internet connection is always/at any time vulnerable to outages. "Home" connectivity is simply not suitable for serious trading. It can and will break at any time.

(2) For serious trading you have to trade from a server/a VPS in a professional datacenter. It's the only way and it's cheap ($30+/month). In a professional datacenter it's not important to permanently monitor connectivity to the MT4 datacenter. You are connected via a professional ISP and latency/packet loss to the same target network will not change over time. No need to monitor it.

More critical then monitoring MT4 datacenter connectivity is to monitor your system as a whole. There are 3 points of failure:

1. Your server goes down/loses connectivity to the switch. This can't be handled from an EA or from inside MetaTrader.
2. Your ISP connection to the internet goes down (in MQL terms = ERR_NO_CONNECTION).
3. The connectivity of the MT4 datacenter to it's own ISP goes down (in MQL terms = ERR_NO_CONNECTION).

But that's not all. Even if all parts are up and running you can still run into an outage if the MT4 tradeserver goes haywire, i.e. the infamous MQL ERR_COMMON_ERROR which means the tradeserver doesn't accept trade requests. Despite having perfect connectivity and receiving realtime quotes.

So my advice is: Handle ERR_NO_CONNECTION and ERR_COMMON_ERROR in your code. Recover from it dynamically and don't forget to send yourself an email/text message if it happens. For the whole system's connectivity use free open-source tools like Nagios. Maybe you want to setup a second VPS/server and both monitor each other via Nagios. In my experience that's the most reliable way.

If you trade from home/office forget everything written and focus on more important things e.g. how to change/overcome that. It just doesn't make sense to invest time in monitoring a home network. It will break anyway, as a matter of fact.

ps: MetaTrader will dynamically switch the server if it finds better latency. I don't know the applied checking interval. Just let it run for 2-3 days and inspect the logs afterwards. You will find the log entries when/where it switches and what the connectivity was at that point in time. Again, nothing to worry about for you.

Thanks for the advice Emmzett. I do agree with your points. Just that I hope to give traders an easy method to understand their personal/ VPS they are using it to trade.