This app will monitor health of your Internet connection by pinging Google (and a few other hosts) and creating nice graphs. It is based on Splunk's official Dockerfile.
This app uses Splunk Lab, an open-source app I built to effortlessly run Splunk in a Docker container.
bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/dmuth/splunk-network-health-check/master/go.sh)
Follow the on-screen instructions for configuration Splunk Network Health Check and you should be running in no time!
Maybe you don't want to pipe some random script on the Internet into your shell, that's cool. Here are the Docker commands to run it and view the output:
docker run --name splunk-network-health-check -d --rm -p 8000:8000 \
-v $(pwd)/splunk-data:/opt/splunk/var/lib/splunk/defaultdb \
dmuth1/splunk-network-health-check
docker logs -f splunk-network-health-check
No matter how you install it, you can then go to http://localhost:8000/ and get graphs like these:
Data will be persisted in the splunk-data/ directory between container runs.
These are the default targets, but can be overridden with -e TARGETS=...:
- google.com
- 8.8.8.8 (Google's DNS Resolver)
- 1.1.1.1 (CloudFlare's DNS Resolver)
I picked Google because it's a fairly well connceted site, and I picked the second two IPs so that if DNS is flaky, it won't impact either those, and those two IP addresses are owned by completely different entities.
--restart unless-stopped- Causes this container to restart if killed Docker is restarted. This is highly recommended.-e "TARGETS=google.com,cnn.com,8.8.8.8,1.1.1.1"- Specify hosts to ping-e ETC_HOSTS=hosts.txt- Specify a hosts file to append to/etc/hosts. Useful for when you want to give names to local devices to ping, such as cameras.-e SPLUNK_PASSWORD=password- Set a non-default password. You WILL do this if you run this in a production environment.
Splunk is an amazing app that lets you monitor your logfiles and perform analytics on them. You can monitor other kinds of data, such as the output of the ping command, which is what this app does. A free copy of Splunk Enterprise can be downloaded at Splunk.com and is downloaded in the Dockerfile.
At its core, this app uses a script called ping.sh. This script runs a hacked version of ping to ping all targets and report on status (packets sent/packets received) every 10 seconds.
A few reasons:
fpingsometimes returned negative RTTs, so that's not a good sign.- Running
ping -c 10multiple times in parallel caused N processes to be spawned every 10 seconds.- The performance impact wasn't terrible, but I wanted this app to be as friendly to the CPU as I could make it.
fpingalso didn't periodically report on the status of hosts that I was pinging.fpingalso got a little weird if there was no Internet connectivity, as DNS would not resolve- You'd think this wouldn't be a problem when pinging IPs, but sadly, it was.
Taking all of these into account, it seemed to make the most sense to hack ping to print its status every 10 seconds and use that as the basis of the uptime graph in Splunk.
Please set a password if you are deploying this on anything other than a personal device.
That is done with -e SPLUNK_PASSWORD=<password>.
There are some helper scripts in bin/ which make the process less painful:
bin/dev.sh - Build an image from the Dockerfile, start it, and spawn abash` shell- This is actually a wrapper for
go.sh, so just follow the on-screen prompts. - When exited, the container will end.
- This is actually a wrapper for
bin/kill.sh- Stop the container and kill it.bin/logs.sh- Tail the logs of the currently running containerbin/clean.sh- Removesplunk-data/directory. This will remove all indexed data (pings and latency) from Splunk!bin/push.sh- Push the image up to Docker Hub
For reasons unclear to me, if you set up a VPN connection, this completely breaks ping in all
Docker containers. Even docker run alpine ping google.com doesn't work.
The workaround is to simply restart Docker. If you started your container with --restart unless-stopped,
it will start up automatically. I am unclear on if this is something that can be fixed.
Yes, you can!
First, install mkcert and then run mkcert -install && mkcert localhost 127.0.0.1 ::1 to generate a local CA and a cert/key combo for localhost.
Then, when you run Splunk Lab, set the environment variables SSL_KEY and SSL_CERT and those files will be pulled into Splunk Lab.
Example: SSL_KEY=./localhost.key SSL_CERT=./localhost.pem ./go.sh
Because one day, someone somewhere will install this app on a machine which faces the public Internet, and passwords will be sent over the clear. In fact, over a long enough time, the odds of this happening approach 1.
THAT is why I use HTTPS/SSL. And why you should too on your apps.
If you're running Docker in Vagrant, or just plain Vagrant, you'll run into issues because Splunk does some low-level stuff with its Vagrant directory that will result in errors like this:
11-15-2022 01:45:31.042 +0000 ERROR StreamGroup [217 IndexerTPoolWorker-0] - failed to drain remainder total_sz=24 bytes_freed=7977 avg_bytes_per_iv=332 sth=0x7fb586dfdba0: [1668476729, /opt/splunk/var/lib/splunk/_internaldb/db/hot_v1_1, 0x7fb587f7e840] reason=st_sync failed rc=-6 warm_rc=[-35,1]
To work around this, disable sharing of Splunk's data directory by setting SPLUNK_DATA=no, like this:
SPLUNK_DATA=no ./go.sh
By doing this, any data ingested into Spunk will not persist between runs. But to be fair, Splunk Lab is meant for development usage of Splunk, not long-term usage.
Splunk has its own license. Please abide by it.
- Splunk, for having such a kick-ass product!
- This text to ASCII art generator, for the logo I used in the script.
- Splunk Lab - A more generic Dockerized version of Splunk which I developed
- Email: doug.muth@gmail.com
- Twitter: http://twitter.com/dmuth
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/dmuth