Question: question comes from reading a lot of articles, especially the ones describing pros and cons.

But each one of them is saying that even though connection itself is secured, data transfers are not. How's that even possible? I mean in both cases you set a essentially a tunnel between your host and remote location, obviously (aside from constant change of ips) that last outgoing connection might not be connected by tunnel itself but still last sign of incoming data should stop on that server -> when data is going back to you it should be already "covered" with vpn/tor tunnel right? And since some companies have based on rules in their country they don't keep logs all should be fine. So why then people are still saying that it's not secured?

Answer: 
Ping would be enough if it is really just about outages. You can use gping which provides a graphical result of the measures.
A ping won't affect the traffic.

As for alternatives, the question you linked in the first place has already some very good ones like mtr or MRTG.
You should be able to look at the router log files. This will show connection and disconnection events. Something like this:

```
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.850000) PPPoE is up -​ Down Rate=79903Kbps, Up Rate=19999Kbps; SNR Margin Down=12.2dB, Up=15.2dB
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.840000) CHAP authentication successful
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.760000) CHAP Receive Challenge
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.760000) Starting CHAP authentication with peer
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.760000) PPP LCP Receive Configuration ACK
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.750000) PPP LCP Send Configuration Request
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.750000) PPP LCP Receive Configuration Reject
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.750000) PPP LCP Send Configuration ACK
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.750000) PPP LCP Receive Configuration Request
14:53:04, 18 May.   (12682426.750000) PPP LCP Send Configuration Request
14:52:13, 18 May.   (12682375.760000) PTM over DSL is up
14:48:33, 18 May.   (12682155.340000) PTM over DSL is down after 211367 minutes uptime
14:48:33, 18 May.   (12682155.340000) PPPoE is down after 211367 minutes uptime [Waiting for Underlying Connection (WAN Ethernet 2 -​ Down)]

```