A few months ago, I wrote about Tobias Oetiker’s MRTG and RRDTool services — which are really leading the charge in collecting / visualizing network monitoring data.Another tool by Oetiker and his colleagues that’s seeing a lot of traction these days is SmokePing, a latency measurement tool that uses RRDtool as the database and graphing back-end.Usually, networking pros use pinging as a diagnostic approach. You experience a problem connecting with a service or machine on the network, so you go into command line, and you try to ping that location. If it answers, then you know that at least the network parts are communicating with each other, and you can use that information as one of the preliminary data points for figuring out the source of the problem. With SmokePing, you can set up different locations on the network to be pinged at the time intervals you specify. With the great graphing / visualization capabilities of RRDTool, you can see over time what the latency is at different points on the network. And you can easily set up alarms correlated with certain thresholds, and by consolidating your different pings, you get a more cohesive / manageable view of all your different latency measurement points in one place. There are other types of open source ping tools out there — such as the popular check-ping in Nagios. But I’ve been finding the SmokePing service to be extremely easy to set up and maintain, and the great graphing capabilities have made it the current leader in open source approaches to pinging services, in my opinion. It’s definitely worth checking out if you’re seeking an easier way to track latency trends across your network. Technology Industry