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:

yamlCopy
---
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)

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

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

The config is read on startup, and can be reloaded with the SIGHUP signal, or with an HTTP POST to the URI path /-/reload.

Building and running

Requires Go >= 1.22

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

On multi-cpu systems it is typically more efficient to limit the prober to one CPU in order to
reduce the number of cross-cpu context switches and packet copies from the kernel to the prober.
This can be done with the GOMAXPROCS environment variable, or by using container (cgroup) limits.

consoleCopy
export GOMAXPROCS=1
./smokeping_prober <targets>

Docker

bashCopy
docker run \
  -p 9374:9374 \
  --privileged \
  --env GOMAXPROCS=1 \
  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.

Health check

A health check can be requested in the URI path /-/healthy.