smokeping_prober

Prometheus style "smokeping" prober.

Overview

This prober sends a series of ICMP (or UDP) pings to a target and records the responses in Prometheus histogram metrics.

usage: smokeping_prober [<flags>] [<hosts>...]

Flags:
  -h, --help                     Show context-sensitive help (also try --help-long and --help-man).
      --config.file=CONFIG.FILE  Optional smokeping_prober configuration yaml file.
      --web.telemetry-path="/metrics"
                                 Path under which to expose metrics.
      --web.systemd-socket       Use systemd socket activation listeners instead of port listeners (Linux only).
      --web.listen-address=:9374 ...
                                 Addresses on which to expose metrics and web interface. Repeatable for multiple
                                 addresses.
      --web.config.file=""       [EXPERIMENTAL] Path to configuration file that can enable TLS or authentication.
      --buckets="5e-05,0.0001,0.0002,0.0004,0.0008,0.0016,0.0032,0.0064,0.0128,0.0256,0.0512,0.1024,0.2048,0.4096,0.8192,1.6384,3.2768,6.5536,13.1072,26.2144"
                                 A comma delimited list of buckets to use
  -i, --ping.interval=1s         Ping interval duration
      --privileged               Run in privileged ICMP mode
  -s, --ping.size=56             Ping packet size in bytes
      --log.level=info           Only log messages with the given severity or above. One of: [debug, info, warn,
                                 error]
      --log.format=logfmt        Output format of log messages. One of: [logfmt, json]
      --version                  Show application version.

Args:
  [<hosts>]  List of hosts to ping

Configuration

The prober can take a list of targets and parameters from the command line or from a yaml config file.

Example config:

---
targets:
- hosts:
  - host1
  - host2
  interval: 1s # Duration, Default 1s.
  network: ip # One of ip, ip4, ip6. Default: ip (automatic IPv4/IPv6)
  protocol: icmp # One of icmp, udp. Default: icmp (Requires privileged operation)
  size: 56 # Packet data size in bytes. Default 56 (Range: 24 - 65535)
  source: 127.0.1.1 # Souce IP address to use. Default: None (automatic selection)
  name: example-target # Name for the target to include as a 'target' label (Default: none)

In each host group the interval, network, and protocol are optional.

The interval Duration is in Go time.ParseDuration() syntax.

NOTE: The config is only read on startup, SIGHUP is not supported (yet).

Building and running

Requires Go >= 1.17

go install github.com/superq/smokeping_prober@latest
sudo setcap cap_net_raw=+ep ${GOPATH}/bin/smokeping_prober

Docker

docker run \
  -p 9374:9374 \
  --privileged \
  quay.io/superq/smokeping-prober:latest \
  some-ping-target.example.com

Metrics

Metric Name	Type	Description
smokeping_requests_total	Counter	Counter of pings sent.
smokeping_response_duration_seconds	Histogram	Ping response duration.
smokeping_response_ttl	Gauge	The last response Time To Live (TTL).
smokeping_response_duplicates_total	Counter	The number of duplicated response packets.
smokeping_receive_errors_total	Counter	The number of errors when Pinger attempts to receive packets.
smokeping_send_errors_total	Counter	The number of errors when Pinger attempts to send packets.

TLS and basic authentication

The Smokeping Prober supports TLS and basic authentication.

To use TLS and/or basic authentication, you need to pass a configuration file using the --web.config.file parameter. The format of the file is described in the exporter-toolkit repository.