Monitoring Network Latency - Smokeping Tutorial

StuartJordan

During the weekend I have setup a small VPS for monitoring network latency, I'm using Ubuntu 16.04 Server edition, I have assigned 1GB Ram and just 15gb hdd to this machine.

Multiple locations can be monitored, and alerts can be setup, here is what the interface looks like:

If you would like to setup SmokePing, please just follow these steps:

Setup a VPS, specs don't need to be high. [e.g 1gb ram]

Install Ubuntu Server 16.04 - https://www.ubuntu.com/download/server
Once installed:

I changed my NIC from DCHP to a static IP Address, eg:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

#My Interface File, My interface is eth0, yours may be different, you can find this out by typing "IP Addr" at the bash CLI

# The Primary network Interface
auto eth0
Iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.202
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.1.254
dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4

Once completed I then restarted the networking service

sudo service networking restart

You should now have a static IP address for your VPS, you can confirm by typing: Ifconfig
I then updated my machine:

sudo apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y

Once this was completed I restarted the machine:

sudo reboot

Once rebooted if we log back in, we are now ready to install smokeping:

sudo apt-get install smokeping

Once installed:

# Enable the config and mod_cgi
sudo a2enconf smokeping
sudo a2enmod cgid
#Reload the apache config
service apache2 reload

You should now be ready to edit the targets for Smokeping:

sudo nano /etc/smokeping/config.d/Targets

Here is an example of my Targets file below, if you would like furthur help with your Targets file please visit: http://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/doc/smokeping_examples.en.html

+ Menu
menu = Google
title = Google Trace

++ Google
host = google.co.uk

+ GWMenu
menu = Gateway
title = Home Gw

++ Gateway
title = BT GW
host = 192.168.1.254

I then edited the pathnames file so sendmail points to the senmail instance or to a valid file otherwise smokeping won't run.

sudo nano /etc/smokeping/config.d/pathnames

sendmail = /bin/false

Install FASTCGI

sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-fcgid

Finally give smokeping and apache a quick restart:

sudo service smokeping restart
sudo service apache2 reload

You should now have a working smokeping Installation, you can access smokeping here:

http://Your.Server.IP/cgi-bin/smokeping.cgi