What is Reddit's opinion of
SmokePing?
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22 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
I've used SmokePing many times. It's that's too complex, try ping -t 8.8.8.8 and after a while hit CTRL + C. It will show you about how much latency + packet loss you are seeing.
Graphs of Comcast Suckage: http://imgur.com/a/YrndF
I'ts been getting worse. I've graphed the loss, latency, and jitter from a multi-homed data center in Atlanta to my Comcast connection at home (also in Atlanta).
Here's the last 3 hours, 30 hours, 10 days, and year. I'm graphing lots of other hosts from this same box to random other places on the Internet and this is BY FAR the worst looking one.
I'm using SmokePing to do the pings and graphs. Also, I'm not using a consumer grade router at home. I have DOCSIS 3.0 modem connected directly to a linux box acting as my router.
http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/
Use that and have a visual representation of loss/latency. Also, I dunno that I would ping goole, that address will change and tons of other people ping it all day long too. You'll get inconsistent results. I would do pings to a few different sites. First one to your upstream router. You can find this by doing a traceroute to google.com and choosing the 2nd or 3rd IP address you see there, one of the first few that ends with "comcast.net". This will show the loss/latency from your home connection to the first few pieces of network gear inside Comcast's network. This is the important part for showing if the issue is near you or "somewhere out on the Internet".
Next I would find an IP address (not a hostname) further out on the Internet that you can ping, perhaps your work or school's IP and graph that too. This is likely outside of Comcast's network. This will help determine the locality of the issue for you.
As far as the speed tests, the link you have seems reasonable. Perhaps you could feed the results into an RRD and grapht that too...
I use smokeping to keep track of latency to all sites I manage. It also alerts based on criteria you setup. Only downside to my setup right now is that there is no dependency tree, so if our main connection goes down I get 100 alerts.
Smokeping is a web front end to MRTG.
Run smoke ping because it'll generate graphs and you can start talking to tech support every week/month about 'down time' or 'service interruptions' to start getting credits. You'll also have these logs for when your issue finally gets escalated.
At my last place I ended up getting about 3 months free because of 'service interruptions'.
Smokeping is great because it not only shows you packet loss/latency like any simple ping monitoring tool, it also shows you jitter. The data is stored in RRD, and you get a nice graph.
I set it up and collected data, which we were able to use to convince Comcast that their wires were faulty at our Superintendent house. Comcast then ran new wires.
As in one-time or something on ongoing basis?
http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/
I mean, what exactly are you trying to visualize? Latency? You can just collect the output and plot it with whatever tool you like. GNUPlot, for example.
http://www.grant-trebbin.com/2013/04/logging-and-graphing-ping-from-linux.html
This may not be exactly what you're looking for, but Smokeping is very useful for monitoring latency. If you have Cisco routers, IP SLA can give you some interesting data as well.
Do you control the VPN devices? Anything useful in the logs? Is there additional logging that you could enable that might shed some more light on what's happening?
For anyone wondering, a better* way to do this is to use a tool like smokeping to monitor latency and packet loss to a number of hosts. Then you can set an alert once a latency or loss threshhold is reached to reset your modem and/or router.
As an additional bonus, you can get historic data and look for patterns like consistent outages at night etc. Here's a slice of my latency graph: http://imgur.com/Syg0gOO
*better here meaning more extensible, and cheaper at the price of free ninety-nine.
Have you tried adding a 2nd listing port on your SSH Server and then test if your are having the same issues?
Port 22 Port 443 Port 80 Port 53
You should also try using SmokePing to see if there is any pattern to the speed issues. http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/probe/SSH.en.html
SmokePing keeps track of your network latency: Best of breed latency visualisation. Interactive graph explorer. Wide range of latency measurement plugins. Master/Slave System for distributed measurement. Highly configurable alerting system. Live Latency Charts with the most 'interesting' graphs. Free and OpenSource Software written in Perl written by Tobi Oetiker, the creator of MRTG and RRDtool
I have them. They're responsive to support tickets and fairly knowledgeable. If you're technical enough set up SmokePing and bug them if there's ever an outage. Their advertised prices are approximately $1/mbit last time I checked. They are installing gigabit slowly so I'm sure prices will have to come down even more. Way better than Comcast/RCN/AT&T/Access Media 3.
Network engineer here (corporate, not ISP) - This product exists and is free; it's called smokeping. http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/
You would have it run and try to ping 5-10 big things (some universities, microsoft, google, amazon, facebook, twitter, reddit, several hops in the ISP).
You'll get a nice graph of latency (ping time) and packet loss to each target. You can even have it email or txt you when shit goes down or latency changes.
Yeah, I hear ya. In any case, if it's Comcast (and I suspect that it is), they're not going to do much about it. You might want to try something like SmokePing to get some data so as to better argue with Comcast
Are you running this all from one host? If you've got multiple DCs I would advise splitting it up w/ a 'pinger' in each DC.
Have you considered SmokePing? Seems to be right up your alley "Master/Slave System for distributed measurement". Plus the developer is known for quality opensource software http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/
So I checked into it, are you sure this is what you meant? As far as I can tell it only checks latency, which is at the bottom of my list, and it's not even for android.
STG - http://leonidvm.chat.ru/
Edit: Enhancing this comment. STG is good when you really need 2-10s polling. Its old, you need to know exactly the SNMP OIDs you want to monitor, but it just works.
Looking into Cacti. It can be a pain, but if you put some effort into it and use the plugins, its absolutely great. Good for 1m or 5m polling, and I'm certain there's a plugin called Realtime that will do ~ 10ms updates. This will be good for overall utilization and traffic patterns. Over a few days/weeks/months, you'll be able to notice usual and unusual traffic patterns, hopefully help pin down problems to specific ports and ingress/egress.
Grab smokeping (http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/). Setup a few local and remote points to monitor. A few years ago I had this weird issue that would creep up every Wednesday at 2pm to 11pm. Made launch night a living hell. We had smokeping setup with remote monitoring of the DC, both public and private addresses at the remote site, and were able to pinpoint the issue to an upstream carrier device. Good for latency trending.
Splunk (free to 500MB/day iirc.) or an ELK stack. Check out www.sexilog.fr - its intended for ESXi, but there's no reason you couldn't create an appropriate dashboard. Send all logs to this. Make pretty graphs!
If you're up for some fun, SysAdminBoard.
Happy monitoring.
Sorry that I didn't read that particular page (sarcasm intended this time)
I was looking at the actual smokeping page as well as several how-tos I found online. Never made it to github. Everything I read didn't mention changing the permissions to the rrds. I reached that conclusion on my own.
I thought I had chowned it before and it didn't work, but I'm on my fourth or fifth revision on my tests, working through several different permission issues, so maybe it was on another system.
Anyway, I changed the files to chmod 770 and chown'ed them to smokeping:www-data, reloaded apache2 and restarted smokeping, and now it seems like it's working.
Thanks for the help (not so much for the attitude)
Cheers
Run Smokeping to keep an eye on network latency http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/
For more graphing checkout Cacti. You can have it poll your home router (or any other device) with snmp and graph the results.
I did the reverse of this, but same concept. I found a few VERY reliable end points (Colo's, Datacenters, etc) that I could ping for specific geographic regions. I then setup a couple AWS instances (once in each region) running Smokeping for about a week. Looked at the charts, decided where I wanted to be... threw out the AWS instances.