Ping logger

This script pings a given list of hosts with fping and reports the measurements (mean, standard deviation, and packet loss) to an InfluxDB server, ideal for display in Grafana.

Requirements

• Python 3: argparse, influxdb, re, shutil, statistics, subprocess, time, xdg, and yaml modules.
• fping package to run ping
• InfluxDB server to receive and store data
• (optional) Grafana installation to graph data

Setup

Configuration file

A YAML file is used to store connection details for the InfluxDB server as well as what servers to monitor with fping. A sample default file is provided in this repository and should be copied and modified for your environment.

The file at $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/ping-logger/config.yaml is used by default but a different file can be specified with the -c or --config argument.

The InfluxDB settings are defined in the InfluxDBClient documentation and passed through as keyword arguments, and some examples are given for influxdb['host'] and dest_hosts to demonstrate the input format. src_host_name is used to help identify multiple running instances of the script on different servers.

A set of tags can be added to all points with an associative array under the top-level tags key. An example of this is to set the hostname of the source server (src).

Additional tags can be added on a per-host basis with the optional additional_tags associative array.

Cron job

The schedule can, of course, be modified. To run the script every minute, for example:

* * * * * /home/nicholas/ping-logger.py

InfluxDB schema

The following schema is used:

• Database name: defined in config.yaml
• Measurement name: ping
• Tag keys: src, dest, and any additional tags defined per host
• Field keys: avg, sd, loss