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GRAPHING
SmokePing is a delux latency measurement tool. It can measure, store and display latency, latency distribution and packet loss. SmokePing uses RRDtool to maintain a longterm datastore and to draw pretty graphs, giving up to the minute information on the state of each network connection.
SmokePing uses latency measurement plugins for seamless extendability.
SMART ALARMS
SmokePing comes with a smart alarm system. Apart from simple threshold alarms, you have the option of defining latency or loss patterns and use them to trigger alarms. This allows you to define a pattern which would generate a single alarm when the loss goes from below 1% to over 20% and stays over 20% for more than 10 minutes. The advantage of this approach is the virtual elimination of duplicate alarms which you would get with a simple threshold based system.
Alarms can be sent to a mail address or a pager and if you want you can also start an external script to handle the alarms.
Complex Alarms can be written as plug-ins.
SUPPORTING SMOKEPING DEVELOPMENT
I am giving SmokePing away for free under the GNU GPL. If you are happy with SmokePing, consider express your appreciation by ordering a CD or DVD off my wish-list.
DYNAMIC IP SUPPORT
SmokePing can also deal with machines who frequently change their IP address by allowing the remote host to call SmokePings attention to its new IP address. In such a setup SmokePing monitors also for how long the remote system could keep its IP address. To ensure that it is not suddenly monitoring the wrong host, SmokePing further tries to fingerprint each of its Dynamic IP targets via SNMP.
TECH BACKGROUND
SmokePing is written in Perl. It consists of a daemon process responsible for data collection and a CGI script presenting the data on the web. The CGI script uses SpeedyCGI to achieve mod_perl like performance without the need to deploy mod_perl on your web server. SmokePing sports a plug-in architecture to easily add new latency measurement capabilities to SmokePing. SmokePing works happily on all Unix platforms.
--- Tobias Oetiker
