Install Smokeping on Ubuntu 16.04

Smokeping is free and open source tool for latency measurement. It allows users to measure, store and display latency, latency distribution and packet loss. With this useful tool you can easily and efficiently monitor the status of your network. SmokePing is not a standalone application. It uses several other tools and services. For example, it uses RRDtool to maintain a long term data-store and to draw graphs, giving up precise information on the state of each network connection. We’ll show you how to Install Smokeping on an Ubuntu 16.04 VPS.

Smokeping comes with the following features:

• Best of breed latency visualisation.
• Interactive graph explorer.
• Wide range of latency measurement plugins.
• Master/Slave System for distributed measurement.
• Highly configurable alerting system.
• Live Latency Charts with the most ‘interesting’ graphs.

In this tutorial we will show you how to install and configure Smokeping on an Ubuntu 16.04 VPS.

Prerequisites

The first thing you should do is to login to your Ubuntu 16.04 VPS via SSH as user root

ssh root@IP_Address -p Port_number

and run the following command to make sure that all installed packages are up to date

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

Install Smokeping

Installing Smokeping is as easy as installing any other Ubuntu package. It can be installed with the apt package manager using the following command

apt-get install smokeping

It will install Smokeping with all necessary dependencies such as dnsutils, echoping, fping, etc…

Smokeping requires a web server and mail server for sending emails. In this tutorial we will install Apache web server and Sendmail as mail server.

apt-get install apache2 sendmail

Once Apache is installed enable the CGI module

a2enmod cgi

and restart the web server for the changes to take effect

service apache2 restart

Smokeping automatically creates a configuration file in Apache, so there is no need to make additional changes on the web server. To access Smokeping, open your favorite web browser and point it to http://IP_Address/smokeping/smokeping.cgi

Configure Smokeping

In the ‘/etc/smokeping/config.d’ directory you will find several Smokeping configurations

cd /etc/smokeping/config.d

Open the ‘General’ file and replace the default vlues with your personal information

nano General
owner = Your Name
contact = [email protected]
mailhost = localhost
cgiurl = http://localhost/smokeping.cgi

save the file and exit.

Smokeping comes with the ability to write your own Alert rules and smokeping will email you when a rule is triggered. To add custom rules, edit the ‘Alerts’ file, modify the ‘to’ and ‘from’ lines.

nano Alerts
to = [email protected]
from = [email protected]

and add your custom alerts as described in the example given in the file.

Next, edit the ‘Targets’ and apply the rules to the servers you want to monitor. For example:

nano Targets

+ Server
menu = linuxcloudvps
title = linuxcloudvpsVPS

++ Server1
menu = Domain
title = Web server
host = server.domain.com

Save the file and restart Smokeping for the changes to take effect.

systemctl restart smokeping

For more information on how to configure and use Smokeping, please check their official documentation.

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If you have one of our VPS hosting plans, there is no need to install Smokeping on your Ubuntu 16.04 VPS yourself. Instead, you can ask our Linux Administrators to install the application for you. They are available 24/7, and can help you out with any issues or requests that you have.

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