Gping – ping, but with a graph | Hacker News Reader

Gping – ping, but with a graph

github.com

362 pointspabs350 comments

Really nice that it allows you to pass a list of hosts at the same time, and it will plot them in the same graph:

For instance, `gping mydomain.com google.com` is really nice for a quick sanity check (is it my Wifi or my hosting provider).

Its a "super-power" (as the page says)

You can also pass commands instead of hosts (for example running “curl google.com”).

mtr (Matt's traceroute) is another great utility for this.

It doesn't graph output, but does show connectivity , latency, packet loss, and variance on a set of hosts between your IP and the destination.

<https://www.bitwizard.nl/mtr/>

(Previously noted in this thread by westurner: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36549005>)

It does have some visualization capabilities if you hit 'd' once or twice. I think it looks nice!

Thanks.

I know there's a GUI version, though I'm almost always using the CLI/terminal interface myself. So I could be missing some things.

The charting display mode is a CLI/terminal feature, though, not a GUI one.

I may damned well have to read the man page and do some looking at stuff.

Oh, holy hell, this is pretty cool!

Thanks!

(I've ... only been using mtr for ~2 decades.)

I never want to disparage people's efforts, but it is a recurring theme for people to unknowingly reinvent mtr.

Another lens is that reinventing or independently arriving at existing (and well-regarded) ideas, methods, systems, etc., is a validation of your own creative process.

It's very difficult to stay on top of all available tools. I find that so long as it's something I can do with shell tools, awk, or other scripting environments I'm often better of inventing than searching as when you create your own tools you're addressing your own specific needs and constraints, whilst when evaluating a third-party tool, you have to undergo much the same process ("does this do what I want it to do?") often without the ability to readily modify the tool to fit a specific use case.

That's not always true, but it often is.

And of course, creation helps expand your own creative abilities.

If mtr is frequently re-invented, that's a strong validation of the original concept as well.

Wow! That's super handy actually. I'm definitely gonna keep note of doing this in the future for my own projects

mtr does traceroute, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MTR_(software) :

> The tool is often used for network troubleshooting. By showing a list of routers traversed, and the average round-trip time as well as packet loss to each router, it allows users to identify links between two given routers responsible for certain fractions of the overall latency or packet loss through the network.[4] This can help identify network overuse problems.[5]

Scapy has a 3d visualization of one traceroute sequence with vpython. In college, I remember modifying it to run multiple traceroutes and then overlaying all of the routes; and wondering whether a given route is even stable through a complete traceroute packet sequence. https://scapy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage.html#tcp-tracer...

One way to avoid running tools that need root for crafting packets at layer 2 is to use setcap:

  setcap CAP_NET_RAW /use/bin/python-scapy

Does traceroute inappropriately connect the dots?

I run mtr using a Prometheus exporter. I think the one I am using is https://github.com/mgumz/mtr-exporter

I have it set up to do trace routes to 1.1.1.1 and to 8.8.8.8, and then I can look at the graphs in Prometheus

I was inspired to set this up on my computer after the house where the computer is at was having very unstable internet for several days.

I made a video about the graphs here https://video.nstr.no/w/hjTH3Vggn2fvpTrQitMmVP

My mind is blown by those 3D graphs. I almost want to make them dynamically drawn in a futuristic style and use that as screensaver...

Like a WebGL VPN company logo screensaver composed of all those routes we shouldn't trust?

graph-drawing gh topic lists a number of JS libraries: https://github.com/topics/graph-drawing

Is there a good way to make a JS screensaver that doesn't leak memory yet? Maybe WebGL could get that done

Maybe. I don't know. But that link sent me to another rabbit hole, thanks:)

Yah, MTR could do it 30 years ago so not sure whats being added here. Need to play with that 3D export thanks for sharing!

I like the graph and being able to use multiple hosts. I could see some benefit to creating bash functions that use gping + cmd + curl since HTTPS will be reachable in more places than ICMP which is often blocked at the last few hops past a datacenter firewall and ICMP numbers can be misleading since most operating systems rate limit it and most routers deprioritize it based on backplane CPU load which has no bearing on the ability to forward packets.

I noticed that if I used "-4" with a host that has both ipv4 and ipv6 addresses it still pings the ipv6 address despite displaying the ipv4 address. Do others here experience that? I'm on version 1.8.0.

Vaguely related (also “ping, but with a graph”, but different): https://github.com/denilsonsa/prettyping

Feature request: sound.

On the rare occasion I need feedback while messing around with cabling. I did write an improvised tool for the purpose, but it's kind of crappy in that it's just around ping.

Behold the power of 'pingu': https://pastebin.com/qTfdZ7C8

The standard ping utility already has audible ping with "-a", it emits a terminal bell sound for every reply.

Could you add a GitHub issue with this suggestion? I like it and I can definitely see if I can add it!

Make sure you understand what MTR actually shows and why.

I love gping, but wish there was more of an in-depth info/manpage. The one it ships with doesn't explain much (What's t/o, for example? How are things calculated?), and the github page doesn't help much either.

Yeah, this is definitely something I want to improve on. The project is used a lot more than I originally expected, so documentation is a bit scarce.

t/o is timeouts by the way

See also:

- ministat

- gnuplot

- https://www.brendangregg.com/dtkshdemos.html

I miss "bing" which was not a search engine, but a "stochastic bandwidth measurement tool". It could tell you the bandwidth between any two network links regardless of limited bandwidth between you and the targets. I could measure T-3 or OC-48 backbone link speeds while I myself was connected, several hops away, on a 33.6Kbps modem link.

It did not last long and it seemed to be abandoned, and popular Linux distros stopped carrying it as a package. I'm not aware of another tool that can perform the same measurements.

In the olden days before IPv6, geoip of IPv4 used to work and there was traceroute-like utility on Windows that could plot IPs on maps called NeoTrace Pro. IIRC, it also included something of a ping map where it would reping every middlebox. Nowadays, not all middleboxes respond and there is often too much carrier overlaying and SDN flow management for IPs to map to any specific physical location like it were a land phone line when every little company bought a Class C and put their business phone number in the ARIN database.

Was it similar to pingplotter?

Thankyou, I was trying to remember what it was called. So sad that it won't work any more though, was pretty fun.

Going makes me think of Google, graping would have been a fun name.

If you squint hard enough “graping” also looks like it’s a google thing. But hey - Google does not own the letter G ;)

I found this useful when trying to diagnose what I thought was a flaky wifi network. Visually seeing both dimensions when something is only subtly broken makes life a lot easier.

I have a quick and dirty CLI that just runs `ping` in a loop and repeats on the terminal proportional to the ping time. It's fantastic and I use it all the time. I also have it update the terminal title so it's useful even if it's not in focus.

Today i was working to add multiline plot support to cli of asciigraph, using that it’s possible to do something very similar.

Post showing multiline plot of ping to multiple hosts: https://mastodon.social/@guptarohit/110638311512899264

Off topic, but it seems that we’ve really stagnated, on the terminal front, especially considering how many clients have full GPU acceleration these days.

How has there not been some basic image/data steaming built in, after all of these decades? Why am I writing scripts that parse human text output?

Because you can | grep text output and that's great.

If you want to have a program that outputs binary data to stdout, then accept binary data on stdin, there’s no reason not to. It isn’t the standard for historical reasons, and because text is easier to bootstrap from manually-inspected results into a script.

For example, the easiest way I’ve found to render generated images into a gif or mp4 is to pipe a sequence of ppm-encoded images into ffmpeg.

There's sixel[0], but not every terminal supports it.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel

Awesome! Thanks for building this and sharing. I did something similar https://github.com/jflittner/ping_visualizer not too long ago, but yours looks way better!

Smokeping does this, but with webui, if it is still around that is.

Previous related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26904588

Brilliant, I'm often on shitty WiFi and have a terminal opening pinging somewhere. This is what I have been locking for to troubleshoot.

Really cool! I love the terminal based graphics

I note that gping is now in Debian.

This immediately made it into my toolbox. Very handy; thanks for the work and the post.

The plot looks a bit weird when I ping my server ;)

    gping ftlping.net

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

Love it

TIL it can also measure and graph the execution time for a list of commands rather than pinging hosts:

host can be a command like curl google.com if the --cmd flag is used.

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