Monitoring Taxonomy

Chapter 6. traditional.free_open.monoliths.network

Not many network-centric tools appeared in the Katar survey, but SmokePing remains a popular monolithic monitoring tool with a network focus.

SmokePing: Ping, with Graphs

SmokePing is a Perl script designed to ping your network components and visualize their latency and packet loss. It is simple in both concept and execution and takes a novel approach to visualization by taking multiple samples per measurement interval (10 by default). The samples are then sorted by latency and the median latency is plotted as the actual value, whereas the actual samples are plotted in gray as deviations. The shade of gray is selected as a function of the distance from the median, and this gives the resulting charts a “smokey” appearance (hence, the tool’s moniker) with darker shades of gray close to the median value, and lighter shades as the deviance increases. The median value itself is also colorized as a function of packet loss.

Push, Pull, Both, or Neither?

A single-instance SmokePing system is wholly pull-based; however, when multiple systems are employed, the “slave” nodes do their own polling and push the result to the “master” system.

Measurement Resolution

The default tick (referred to as a “step” in the documentation) is 60 seconds.

Data Storage

SmokePing was written by the author of RRDTool and uses RRDTool for storage and visualization.

Analysis Capabilities

SmokePing line-graphs do a very nice job of depicting the latency ...