StrafePingMonitor

This monitor uses ICMP to monitor packet delay variation to a specific endpoint. The main use case is to monitor a WAN endpoint and visualize packet loss and ICMP packet round-trip time deviation. The StrafePingMonitor performs multiple ICMP echo requests (pings) and stores the response time of each as well as the packet loss.

This monitor is typically used on WAN connections and not activated for every ICMP-enabled device in your network. Since StrafePingMonitor requires many more I/O requests than a single IcmpMonitor poll, use this monitor only where necessary to check packet loss.

Credit to Tobias Oetiker, as graphing of this feature is an adaptation of the SmokePing tool that he developed.

01 strafeping
Figure 1. Visualization of a graph from the StrafePingMonitor

Monitor facts

Class Name

org.opennms.netmgt.poller.monitors.StrafePingMonitor

Configuration and use

Table 1. Monitor-specific parameters for the StrafePingMonitor
Parameter Description Default

Required

ping-count

The number of pings to attempt each interval.

20

failure-ping-count

The number of pings that need to fail for the service to be considered down.

20

wait-interval

Time in milliseconds to wait between each ICMP echo-request packet.

50

rrd-repository

The location to write RRD data. Generally, you will not want to change this from the default.

$OPENNMS_HOME/share/rrd/response

rrd-base-name

The name of the RRD file to write (minus the extension, .rrd or .jrb).

strafeping

Optional

timeout

Time in milliseconds to wait before assuming that a packet has not responded.

800

retry

The number of retries to attempt when a packet fails to respond in the given timeout.

2

allow-fragmentation

Whether to set the "Don’t Fragment" bit on outgoing packets.

true

dscp

DSCP traffic-control value.

0

packet-size

Number of bytes of the ICMP packet to send.

64

This monitor implements the Common Configuration Parameters.

Examples

By default, you can find a separate poller package in poller-configuration.xml called strafer. Configure the include-range or a filter to enable monitoring for devices with the service StrafePing.

The following example enables the monitoring for the StrafePing service on IP interfaces in the range 10.0.0.1 to 10.0.0.20. Additionally, you must assign the nodes to a surveillance category named Latency.

Example uses CentOS/RHEL path name. For Debian/Ubuntu, use /var/lib/opennms/rrd/response.

<package name="strafer" >
  <filter>categoryName == 'Latency'</filter>
  <include-range begin="10.0.0.1" end="10.0.0.20"/>
  <rrd step="300">
    <rra>RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:1:2016</rra>
    <rra>RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:12:1488</rra>
    <rra>RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:288:366</rra>
    <rra>RRA:MAX:0.5:288:366</rra>
    <rra>RRA:MIN:0.5:288:366</rra>
  </rrd>
  <service name="StrafePing" interval="300000" user-defined="false" status="on">
    <parameter key="retry" value="0"/>
    <parameter key="timeout" value="3000"/>
    <parameter key="ping-count" value="20"/>
    <parameter key="failure-ping-count" value="20"/>
    <parameter key="wait-interval" value="50"/>
    <parameter key="rrd-repository" value="/opt/opennms/share/rrd/response"/>
    <parameter key="rrd-base-name" value="strafeping"/>
  </service>
  <downtime interval="30000" begin="0" end="300000"/>
  <downtime interval="300000" begin="300000" end="43200000"/>
  <downtime interval="600000" begin="43200000" end="432000000"/>
  <downtime begin="432000000" delete="true"/>
</package>
<monitor service="StrafePing" class-name="org.opennms.netmgt.poller.monitors.StrafePingMonitor"/>