2.6 Keep-Alives Considered Harmful

2.6. Keep-Alives Considered Harmful

Some implementers have adopted the practice of sending test RADIUS requests to see if a server is alive. This practice is strongly discouraged, since it adds to load and harms scalability without providing any additional useful information. Since a RADIUS request is contained in a single datagram, in the time it would take you to send a ping you could just send the RADIUS request, and getting a reply tells you that the RADIUS server is up. If you do not have a RADIUS request to send, it does not matter if the server is up or not, because you are not using it.

If you want to monitor your RADIUS server, use SNMP. That's what SNMP is for.