Network monitoring

gping

Keeping with the theme of testing out command-line tools starting with the letter "g" that replace ancient command-line stalwarts (see gtop), gping is an attempt to usurp ping. Many of us must use ping all the time – it sends a signal to a remote computer and waits for an echo request packet to be sent back. Its name comes from the sound of a sonar pulse, and it was originally written by Mike Muuss in December 1983 as a simple network troubleshooting tool, but it's just as useful in the age of flaky WiFi and occluded 4G. Fire up a simple ping command, and you can see not only whether the remote site is online, but whether it really is taking an age for a page to load, as well as whether your DNS is working and whether the response time changes under different network conditions.

gping does the same thing, but it adds a very useful graph to its output, so you can see the change in latency over time. While the original output from ping could be scanned and scrolled, it is often difficult to get a real feeling for how erratic a ping value might be from a big list of milliseconds. With gping, you can see whether the fluctuations are large or small and easily see whether something else may be affecting the network latency between you and the server you are testing. It could be that some huge download is sucking up every bit of bandwidth, for example, and you'll be able to see how this affects latency on your network. You can also see the current latency, alongside the maximum, minimum, and average for the time you run gping, all of which helps when detecting problems.

Project Website

https://github.com/orf/gping

Not to be confused with a Windows tool of the same name, our gping sticks to the terminal.

Video processing