This post was still in my drafts for maybe 2 years now. Not sure if it is complete, but it did remind me of the nice tool ‘SmokePing’. 

I’m using Open Monitoring Distribution as a decent monitoring setup on my local and some customer networks. It isn’t a 5 minute setup though and sometime you just don’t need this many features.

Somewhere I found an article writing about Smokeping and I gave it a shot on a Raspberry Pi. It does what it says, it pings to hosts and maintains a decent graph on the response times. It has some additional features like HTTP, SSH tests and even a master/slave setup.

I’ve installed it on a Raspberry Pi 3 which I connected directly to my main cable modem/router. I experience some outages so now and then and this way I can easily determine if this is caused at the router or somewhere in my local network.

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (preferably a 2 or 3 to get some performance) and install Raspbian OS. When you have it running you do the following:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install smokeping sendmail  (You really need sendmail too!!)

(on a Raspberry Pi 3 I needed the below  apache config too. On an older install it was just working without these apache commands)
cd /etc/apache2/conf-available
ln -s ../../smokeping/apache2.conf smokeping.conf
a2enconf smokeping
a2enmod cgid
service apache2 restart