SmokePing can measure, store and display latency, latency distribution and packet loss. SmokePing uses RRDtool to maintain a long term data-store and to draw pretty graphs, giving up-to-the-minute information on the state of each network connection.
Its Main Features are:
- Measures latency as well as latency variation.
- Wide variety of probes, ranging from simple ping to web requests and custom protocols.
- Advanced alarm system, triggering on configurable ‘latency patterns’.
- Master/slave deployment model to run measurements from multiple sources in parallel.
- Ajax based graph navigation.
- Chart mode, to show the most interesting graphs first
- Plug-able probes, alarms (matchers) and charting function.
- Written in Perl for easy expandability.
- Fully documented.
But whilst it is really feature packed, it is a pretty steep learning curve to just get going, compared to say the proprietary Windows version of PingPlotter that I used many years ago. I’d say the Docker install of SmokePing is maybe a trifle easier, as the config files etc are a bit more standard than the various flavours of Linux install (the AUR install was putting config files in a different place for me).
However, if you do want a more of a PingPlotter alternative, there is also Pingnoo for Linux that is as easy as PingPlotter to get going and shows traceroute as well.