Is there an easy way to monitor for Internet failures?

Is there an easy way to monitor for Internet failures?
On Friday morning, Level3 had a major outage, which in turn was causing intermittent failures for our Curbstone credit card system which runs on our i5.
It was 4 hours before we were notified that Level3 was the source of the issue and no problem of ours.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/20/level3_outages_reported_in_us/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Curbstone uses a URL, which rotates to any one of 6 ips, spread across the US.
When the IP was used that was in the Level3 outage area is when we noticed intermittent failures.

Thank You
_____
Paul Steinmetz
IBM i Systems Administrator

Pencor Services, Inc.
462 Delaware Ave
Palmerton Pa 18071

610-826-9117 work
610-826-9188 fax
610-349-0913 cell
610-377-6012 home

psteinmetz@xxxxxxxxxx
http://www.pencor.com/