Smokeping

Smokeping is a network latency monitor powered on RRDTool. It collects data about network latency for various services and reports it through a convenient, graph-powered website. It is currently running on Hestia.

Monitoring
Smokeping monitors return trip time and number of packets lost for a given ping. It is powered on Perl (and thus has a large number of available plugins). In addition to ping times for all of our servers (and the printer), we monitor the following services:
 * LDAP
 * HTTP
 * DNS
 * SMTP

Future things to monitor
Even though Smokeping is not as versatile or easy to adapt as Nagios, there are a few extra things we could include. Among those are SSH for all of the servers and other EchoPing-powered mail checks.

Configuration
The configuration is fairly basic, with some files in /etc/smokeping that determine what hosts/services to ping. It has the ability to send email alerts, but those are not configured at this time. The entire /etc/smokeping/config.d folder is controlled via cfengine.

Website config
The web interface is driven by a single CGI script that has been moved into /var/www/smokeping. In that same folder are all of the images generated by the daemon and other parts of the website. Furthermore, we use speedyCGI to make the perl script not take forever to load.

Web interface
Authenticated users can access the website at https://smokeping.ugcs.caltech.edu. The menu on the left selects groups and machines (or services), while clicking on a chart changes it so that it can be manipulated (zooming in, etc).