An alternative to smokeping
I have been using smokeping for 25 years. It’s a great tool that provides a useful and unique data set. The thing about smokeping is that it does not really have a lot of alternatives. To that end, I embarked on an amateurish re-imagining of both smokeping and its contemporary successor, vaping in golang. Initial version supports ping and DNS and has a nearly identical structure to Vaping (why re-invent the wheel?). The architecture is, like its predecessors, plugin based and modular, with the potential therefor of being a compiled, faster, lower overhead implementation. Your guess is as good as mine if that is actually the case.
This is still fairly green, but it does “work”, and it seems to work fairly well.
The key goals were:
- An easier, drop-in replacement for most of what I use smokeping for (ping, DNS testing)
- Low overhead with few dependencies to run
- Simple web interface that is really only useful for testing configurations.
- File logging of results
- Expandable with go based plugins.
- A long-term archive of data that is available via https.
This project is still pretty early, and I am definitely an amateur developer who used a lot of help to build this as it is the most complex thing I have done to date. The git repo can be found here with a very simple, example development site that is live available here. Screenshot of the example dashboard can be found below.
