SmokePing 2.4.2

SmokePing is a deluxe latency measurement tool. SmokePing project 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. SmokePing comes with a smart alarm system. Apart from simple threshold alarms, you will also have the option of defining loss and latency 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.

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. 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.

Here are some key features of "SmokePing":

· Best of breed latency visualisation.
· Interactive graph explorer.
· Wide range of latency measurment 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

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· added strict to both wrappers and fixed some followup errors -- tobi
· kill taint error in Smokeping.pm -- tobi
· better master/slave secrets documentation -- tobi
· do not load :sys_wait_h from POSIX perl module since this seems to be missing in some linux distros and we can do alright without.