Create a prober for connectivity of home Internet

[FranklinYu]

Need to know how good the connection is.

[FranklinYu]

Requirement

1. The system shows a history of various metrics, instead of only the current status, so that we can analyze the trend, or know the duration of a network outage.
2. The history is plotted in a graph/dashboard.
3. The dashboard is interactive; it can show exact number on hover.

Design

Implement a program (a daemon, or a systemd timer) running on my home server. The program does following:

1. Pings several domains, and/or makes HTTP requests to several URLs.
2. Record the latency.
3. Sends the latency data to Google Cloud Monitoring.

The domains and/or URLs should be configurable. I can probably use OpenTelemetry for Python (with its GCM support).

Alternatives considered

• Smokeping. Satisfy requirement 1 and 2, but not 3. Feasible (tried before); good fallback.
• Nagios. Seems more fancy than Smokeping; not sure about configuration complexity.
• Prometheus with Grafana. Sounds like overkill, and I need to manage the graphing instance as well. Pro: more control than Google Cloud Monitoring.

[FranklinYu]

Updated design: Configure Cloudprober to probe the websites, and export them to Stackdriver.

[FranklinYu]

This is done. May write a blog about this.