Ping ICMP Monitoring

Ping — a well-known, simple and pervasive utility available on all OS platforms — is one easy way to monitor network availability, latency and packet loss data. Ping operates at Layer 3, and uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) to send messages from the originating host to a destination computer and back to test reachability of a host on an Internet Protocol (IP) network.

Telegraf input plugin: Ping

The Telegraf Ping Input Plugin sends a ping message by executing the system ping command and reports the results. First, let's introduce Telegraf.

Telegraf is the collection module of InfluxData's TICK Stack time series platform (see diagram below) with its own project Telegraf in the open source community. One of the main use-cases for adopting a times series platform is network monitoring, often to deploy a centralized network monitoring platform. Gathering the data of interest is a key part of any monitoring solution. This can be done in multiple ways.

In order to facilitate the monitoring process, Telegraf was designed as a lightweight, plugin-driven collection that can run on your hosts, collecting data about your systems and applications, or it can operate remotely, scraping data via endpoints exposed by your applications.

See below TICK Stack architecture:

Telegraf Ping Plugin configuration

Telegraf Ping Plugin configuration is simple and easy. Among other parameters, one can list the urls to ping, how often, timeout period and from which interface or address to send ping from. Some metrics collected from ping round-trip messages include: packets transmitted and received, packet loss, minimum, maximum and average response times.

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