Network Ping Monitor

Description

The Network Ping Monitor is a Python-based tool designed to continuously monitor network latency by pinging a specified host and visualizing the response times in real-time. This tool is particularly useful for network administrators, IT professionals, and anyone needing to monitor and analyze the stability and performance of their network connections. The script provides a live graph of ping response times and includes various statistics like average, minimum, maximum, and current response times, as well as standard deviation, to help identify and analyze network issues.

Inspiration

The tool was inspired by mtr tool but it lacks graph visualisation of pings.

I did some research, tried to find ready tool. Here is short summary of what I've found.

But no one solution I've found satisfied my requirements. So I wrote my own solution.

The Network Ping Monitor stands out by providing comprehensive statistics, including timeouts and packet loss, along with a dynamic, real-time graphing capability within a GUI. This makes it particularly user-friendly and informative for monitoring and analyzing network performance.

Features

• Real-time Ping Monitoring: Continuously pings a specified host and records response times.
• Dynamic Graph Plotting: Live updates of a plot graph displaying ping response times.
• Auto-scaling Graph: The graph auto-scales to accommodate varying response times.
• Network Statistics Display: Shows current, average, maximum, and minimum response times, along with the standard deviation, network losts and delays.
• Vital parameters for VOIP applications: Jitter and max number of sequental losts.
• Command-line Interface: Easy to use command-line interface for setting up the host to be pinged.
• Multi-threaded Design: Utilizes threading for simultaneous data collection and graph updating.
• IPv6 support: Supports IPv6 ip's and domains.

Requirements

• Python 3.x
• Matplotlib (pip install matplotlib)
• NumPy (pip install numpy)

Installation

1. Clone the repository or download the script.

   git clone git@github.com:vitovt/ping_graph.git
   cd ping_graph

2. Ensure Python 3.x is installed on your system.
3. Install required Python packages: matplotlib and numpy.

OR

3. Install dependencies from requirements.txt:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Run the script from the command line, specifying the host to ping as an argument:

python network_ping_monitor.py [host]

Replace [host] with the hostname or IP address you want to monitor (e.g., google.com).

Arguments

• host: The hostname or IP address to ping.

Optional Arguments

• -W, --timeout: Timeout in milliseconds for each ping request. Default is 150 milliseconds.
• -i, --interval: Interval between pings in seconds. Default is 0.1 second.
• -D, --dead_timeout: Execution timeout in milliseconds for each ping command. Default is 500 milliseconds. Maximum is 10,000 milliseconds. Must be greater than or equal to timeout.
• -6, --ipv6: Use IPv6 address for the ping.

How Timeouts Work

• -W, --timeout: This is the timeout value for each individual ping request. If a ping response takes longer than this value, it is considered a timeout, and the response time is recorded as the timeout value.
• -D, --dead_timeout: This is the maximum time allowed for the ping command to execute. If the ping command takes longer than this value, it is forcibly terminated, and the response time is recorded as the dead_timeout value. This ensures that the script does not hang indefinitely if the network is down or the host is unreachable.

Example

python network_ping_monitor.py google.com

This command will start pinging google.com and open a window displaying the live graph and statistics.

License

[GPLv3]

Contributing

Contributions to the Network Ping Monitor are welcome. Please read the contributing guidelines before submitting pull requests.

Support and Contact

For support, feature requests, or any queries, please open an issue in the GitHub repository.