# oetiker/SmokePing

The Active Monitoring System

Repository: https://github.com/oetiker/SmokePing
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/smokeping
Homepage: http://www.smokeping.org
Language: Perl
License: GPL-2.0
License Family: copyleft
Last push: 2026-08-10T17:57:47+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 66/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 97, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 5446, "days_push": 23, "days_rel": 560, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 1}
- flags: none
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1952, forks 216 (observed 2026-08-28T04:05:58.277274+00:00)

## What it is
SmokePing is a Perl-based network latency monitoring system that measures, stores, and graphically displays latency, latency distribution, and packet loss using RRDtool as its long-term data store. It runs as a daemon that periodically probes network targets and presents interactive smoke-style graphs through a CGI web frontend, with configurable pattern-based alerting and a master/slave mode for measuring from multiple locations.

## Use cases
- monitor network latency over time with long-term graphs
- track packet loss and latency variation between hosts
- get alerted when network latency patterns degrade
- measure round trip times to targets from multiple locations
- visualize jitter and network connection quality history
- ping many hosts on a schedule and graph the results
- keep a historical record of network performance for capacity planning

## When to choose
- You need long-term latency, latency-distribution, and packet-loss history with detailed smoke graphs
- You want pattern-based alerting that triggers on configurable latency behaviors rather than simple thresholds
- You need distributed measurements from multiple vantage points via the master/slave deployment model
- You are on a Unix system and want an extensible, self-hosted latency probe with pluggable probe modules (ping, web requests, custom protocols)

## When to avoid
- You need a full-stack monitoring platform covering services, hosts, and uptime beyond network latency (consider Zabbix, Icinga, or Prometheus)
- You require a Windows-native or non-Unix deployment
- You want a modern web stack and real-time dashboards rather than a Perl/CGI-based frontend
- You need sub-second, event-driven metrics collection instead of periodic interval probing

## Facets
- artifact type: application
- maturity: stable
- function: monitoring, alerting, data-visualization, cli
- domain: networking, monitoring, self-hosted
- platform: bsd, cli, self-hosted
- tags: rrdtool, latency-measurement, packet-loss, network-monitoring, perl, ping, cgi, graphing, probes, master-slave, devops, linux, macos, web-server

## Member repositories
- oetiker/SmokePing (main) score 66

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:58.277274+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T03:06:47.288594+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/oetiker/SmokePing (fetched 2026-08-28T04:05:58.277274+00:00, sha 965139129e5f)
  - homepage: http://www.smokeping.org (fetched 2026-08-29T10:46:28.406392+00:00, sha 183beb2fdf0a)
  - site_page: https://oss.oetiker.ch/smokeping/doc/index.en.html (fetched 2026-08-29T10:46:28.415450+00:00, sha 0c25b3181da3)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.