graphping

Description

Graphping is a tool to ping a list of endpoints and send the results to statsd

It allows you to create graphs of latency in a similar manner to smokeping

Graphping is written in Go and takes advantages of many of Go's features:

• Built in concurrency
• Fast
• Easy to build/install

Usage

Graphping requires a few options to run. Here's the basic usage:

NAME:
   graph-ping - Ping a list of endpoints and send the resulting metrics to statsd

USAGE:
   main [global options] command [command options] [arguments...]

VERSION:
   0.1

AUTHOR(S):
   Lee Briggs

COMMANDS:
     help, h  Shows a list of commands or help for one command

GLOBAL OPTIONS:
   --config-file value, -c value  Path to configuration file
   --statsd value, -s value       Address of statsd listener
   --verbose                      Output metrics in logs
   --help, -h                     show help
   --version, -v                  print the version

Config File

Graphping requires a config file declaring the endpoints you wish to ping. The config format is hcl meaning you can either provide a human readable HCL config file or a JSON config file. An example HCL file looks like this:

interval = 10 # A global interval. Can be overwritten per target group
prefix = "graphping" # A global prefix for statsd metrics


# Declare a target group with a name
target_group "search_engines" {
  # a custom ping interval for this group
  interval = 2
  # A prefix for the statsd metric for this group
  prefix = "search"
  # A name for the target. This becomes the statsd metric
  target "google" {
    address = "www.google.co.uk"
  }
  target "bing" {
    address = "www.bing.com"
  }
}

# You can specify multiple target groups
target_group "news_sites" {
  prefix = "uk"
  target "bbc" {
    address = "www.bbc.co.uk"
  }
}

StatsD Listenser

You need to specify the address of the statsd listener you want to send metrics to. This is in string format, including port number.

For example:

graphping -c /path/to/config/file.hcl -s 127.0.0.1:8125

Building

The project uses glide for dependencies. So:

Install it into your gopath and then run glide install

From here, you can build it:

go build main.go

Important Notes

• I am still learning Go, so there may be some absolute nonsense in here. Pull requests are very welcome

Acknowledgements

• Thanks to my colleague @cspargo for his initial idea and the first prototype of the code