Monitor uptime with SmokePing

Dec 1, 2015 · 2 min read

If you’re a linux enthusiast and you don’t currently read the LinuxJournal, I suggest you have a look. They’re a great publication on everything linux, and they regularly provide useful content ranging from reviews, code snippets, how-tos, and tips & tricks. They publish digitally now over a variety of formats, which makes reading very convenient on any device you may have.

One of the articles I found particularly useful was on setting up SmokePing, an uptime and latency tracking project based on FastCGI, and RRDTool. Shawn Powers highlights its details and how-to set it up. You can go directly to the project’s site for the code and installation documentation, however if you’re a Fedora user, SmokePing is already packaged up in the fedora repo. I’ve had some availability trouble with a couple addon domains lately, so I’m going to track a couple public URLs for my blogsite. I’m starting with a fresh install of Fedora 23:

Install smokeping:

 dnf install smokeping

You’ll need sendmail for notifications, or just to satisfy binary checks in smokeping’s config:

dnf install sendmail

Add your IPs/hostnames to the config smokeping will check (optionally add owner/notification info):

vi /etc/smokeping/config
...
owner    = Andrew
contact  = email.address@domain.com
...
*** Alerts ***
to = email.address@domain.com
from = root@monitor-f23
...
menu = Top
title = RHCE Blog Site Monitor
remark = Tracking uptime since the beginning of time.

+ RHCEBlogSite
menu= RHCE Blog Site
title= RHCE Blog Site

++ calgaryrhce
host = calgaryrhce.ca

++ rhce
host = rhce.ca

++ torontorhce
host = torontorhce.ca

Smokeping adds an httpd conf file module in its install, which I’m going to modify to allow from all IPs:

vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/smokeping.conf
...
<Directory "/usr/share/smokeping" >
  Require all granted                   // adding in this line
  # Require ip 2.5.6.8                  // comment out this
  # Require host example.org


<Directory "/var/lib/smokeping" >
  Require all granted                   // adding in this line
  # Require ip 2.5.6.8                  // comment out this
  # Require host example.org

Now enable and start both smokeping and httpd:

systemctl enable httpd
systemctl enable smokeping

systemctl start httpd
systemctl start smokeping

Now, browsing to my Fedora 23 host’s SmokePing URL, http://monitor-f23/smokeping/sm.cgi shows me this: (I’ve let it run for a few days now, giving it time to gather enough data for interesting graphing)

If I click one of the graphs, I get a more detailed view of the data:

Happy monitoring! My complete config files for smokeping and apache are located at my github.