pingwatch

Simple monitoring tool for your Internet connection, pings hosts and reports on availability and trends

Screen shot

Building

Prerequisites:

• Go 1.13 or later

git clone https://github.com/fazalmajid/pingwatch
cd pingwatch
go build

On Linux, run:

sudo setcap cap_net_raw=+ep pingwatch

this allows pingwatch to open raw sockets so it can send ICMP packets.

You can get a list of command-line flags using pingwatch -h

Database

Configuration

The list of hostnames or IPs to ping is in the table dests.

To add a destination, run:

sqlite3 pingwatch.sqlite << EOF
insert into dests values ('1.1.1.1'), ('8.8.8.8'), ('www.google.com');
EOF

After database is initialized you can add or delete destinations as follows:

To add a destination, run:

pingwatch -add example.com

To remove a destination, run:

pingwatch -del example.com

Measurement data

The actual measurements are in the table pings:

• time timestamp in SQLite julian day format, UTC)
• host hostname that was pinged
• ip IPv4 or IPv6 address host resolved to at ping time
• rtt ping round-trip time in milliseconds. A value of -3600 means the ping timed out

Housekeeping

You can use sqlite triggers to automatically clear old entries to keep the database small

This trigger will delete entries from table pings which are older than 1 day:

sqlite3 pingwatch.sqlite << EOF
CREATE TRIGGER clean1day AFTER INSERT ON pings
BEGIN
	DELETE FROM pings WHERE pings.time < julianday('now', '-1 day');
END
EOF

Refer to the julianday() function manual for details

Web user interface

The web user interface can be accessed at http://localhost:8086/ by default (or change it using the -p flag).

By convention, a ping time of -100ms means timeout, so downtime can stand out in the graph. In the SQLite database, this is stored as -3600e3

You can zoom in by selecting a time range, scroll using by pressing Shift while moving the mouse or zoom out back to the original view by double-clicking (graphs are courtesy of the awesome Dygraphs library).

The default date range for the graph is 14 days, but you can change that:

• pingwatch -days 7 to show only the last 7 days
• pingwatch -display 6h to display only the last 6 hours