`ping_plotter`

I've been having consistent ping issues for a bit now for some reason and I thought it might be useful to write a little script to help me visualize/quantify those issues.

The purpose of this tool is simply to ping a single server for however many times and then plot 4 metrics: the round-trip time (RTT), the average RTT, the average jitter and finally the number of ping packets lost.

Implementation

This utilizes Python's subprocess module to run the ping command each second over a period of time. The results are then plotted in real time using matplotlib.

Dropped packets repeat the previous time and maintain the same mean.

Usage

git clone https://github.com/caojohnny/ping_plotter.git
cd ping_plotter
python3 ping_plotter.py [ping_target]

Requires Python 3, matplotlib (pip3 install -U matplotlib) and some compatible GUI toolkit like python-tk (apt-get install python3-tk) installed.

Demo

--- Statistics ---
ping count = 60
dropped count = 4
mean rtt = 151.11627659281308 ms
mean jitter = 112.14193276703041 ms

Caveats

Unix (macOS/Linux) only - uses the ping command
Makes a best-effort attempt to run in plot_length seconds, but this is not guaranteed depending how accurate the pause timer is and how long it takes for the plot to render on each round

Credits

Built with neovim

Uses Matplotlib