MultiPing: A pure-python implemention to monitor IP addresses with pings

MultiPing is a Python library to monitor one or many IP addresses via ICMP echo (ping) requests. It works for Python 2 and 3, supports timeouts and retries, is small and compact and does not rely on any 3rd party packages, aside from what's included in Python.

It is ideally suited to monitor large numbers of hosts in clusters, but is just as suitable to check on a single address.

MultiPing was developed for the vpc-router project, but can be used on its own.

Installation

Installation via pip

MultiPing is available in PyPi, the Python Package Index. Therefore, you can install it simply with:

pip install multiping

Installation from source

After downloading the code or cloning this repository, please run the setup.py file, which is included in the source code:

python setup.py install

Contributions

We welcome any contributions, bug reports or feedback. Please use our issue tracker to file bugs or request additional features. We are happy to consider pull requests as well.

Using MultiPing

Note: ICMP packets can only be sent by processes with root privileges.

Here is an example of how to use MultiPing in your own code:

from multiping import MultiPing

# Create a MultiPing object to test three hosts / addresses
mp = MultiPing(["8.8.8.8", "youtube.com", "127.0.0.1"])

# Send the pings to those addresses
mp.send()

# With a 1 second timout, wait for responses (may return sooner if all
# results are received).
responses, no_responses = mp.receive(1)

The receive() function returns a tuple containing a results dictionary (addresses and response times) as well as a list of addresses that did not respond in time. The results may be processed like this:

...

for addr, rtt in responses.items():
    print "%s responded in %f seconds" % (addr, rtt)

if no_responses:
    print "These addresses did not respond: %s" % ", ".join(no_responses)
    # Sending pings once more, but just to those addresses that have not
    # responded, yet.
    mp.send()
    responses, no_responses = mp.receive(1)

    ...

Note that send() can be called multiple times. If there are any addresses left for which no response has been received yet then this will resend pings to those remaining addresses.

A convenient multi_ping() function is provided, which implements retries and delivers results in a single function call:

from multiping import multi_ping

addrs = ["8.8.8.8", "youtube.com", "127.0.0.1"]

# Ping the addresses up to 4 times (initial ping + 3 retries), over the
# course of 2 seconds. This means that for those addresses that do not
# respond another ping will be sent every 0.5 seconds.
responses, no_responses = multi_ping(addrs, 2, 3)