Presented at linux.conf.au
Abstract: Ping, it is your go-to tool for diagnosing networking issues. But what is a ping actually doing and what is it telling you? What if you could keep a record of ping responses across your network to look at historical issues and potentially predict upcoming problems? In this talk I’ll give a quick overview of the venerable and beloved ICMP ping. I’ll then introduce Pingbeat, a small open-source program written in Go that can be used to record pings to hundreds or thousands of hosts on a network. There are many existing tools out there similar to Pingbeat, but its power lies in its ability to write the ping response to Elasticsearch, an open-source NoSQL-like data-store with powerful, built-in search and analytics. Combined with Kibana, a web-based front-end to Elasticsearch, you get an interactive interface to track, search and visualise your network health in near real-time.