Gateway Monitoring and Packet Loss

[Meg]

Hello: I recently started monitoring my gateway and noticed that I am getting intervals of packet loss. I am running opnsense 25.7.7_4 with adguard home and unbound as my recursive resolver. I am also using zenarmor. I was just wondering if anybody can explain what I am seeing here on the health/quality graph and what could be causing it. As I have never monitored this before I am not sure if this is normal behavior. See attached graph.

[keeka]

The default monitor address (derived from the gateway) may fail, or be slow, to respond to ICMP requests. Try changing the monitor IP in the gateway settings.
The delay also looks rather large IMO. If you disable the 'loss' series in that graph, you will get a finer grained view of the delay (RTT). I expect that will also improve if you change the monitor IP.
Of course none of this will improve your connection but it may give a better indication of the real state of the link.

[meyergru]

ICMP is a low-priority service that is not guaranteed to work. Some gateways do not reliably answer to those requests, especially when they are under high load.

[Meg]

Thanks for the replies. I changed my monitor ip to google and cloudflare  which both still had somewhat high delay and still some packet loss to google. I switched to quad9 and my delay has dropped from an average of 33ms with occasional  spikes to 66ms and still some packet loss wsith 8.8.8.8 down to 22ms with occasional spikes to 32ms with no packet loss on quad9.