pingg

Graphical ping utility to monitor your internet connection quality.

What it does?

pingg utility displays graphical (OK, ASCII style but still graphical) statistics of ping requests. If you have ever used ping as a connection quality monitor you’ll got the point.

See an example. This is exact the same session (VPN to Australia followed by no connection and a full speed connection):

ping pingg
Plain ping pingg example

Advantages over plain ping are:

  1. It performs a ping request every 5 seconds (we don’t need stats every second);
  2. It waits up to 5 seconds before request timeout (this is maximum reasonable request response time);
  3. Response time is presented graphicaly where 1ms is represented by empty bar and timeout is represented by a screen-wide bar of = signs;
  4. The bar length is in a logarithmic scale to better represent observable internet connection quality.

Installation guide

In order to ‘install’ pingg you need to place the only script available within this repository in your exacutable path. For example:

$ cd <any directory within your $PATH>
$ wget https://github.com/szn/pingg/raw/master/pingg
$ chmod 755 pingg

pingg uses external utilities such as, dig, grep, wc, tput, ping, cut, bc, printf and seq. All of them should be available in any mordern unix-alike operating system.

Brew/OSX install

pingg is a valid Homebrew cask:

$ brew tap szn/pingg https://github.com/szn/pingg.git
$ brew install szn/pingg/pingg

How to use

Using pingg is as simple as typing the script name in your terminal window:

$ pingg
IP address 8.8.8.8
   499ms ====================
    30ms

pingg uses Google DNS server IP address by default (8.8.8.8). You could change that providing either an IP address or host name as the first parameter. Examples are:

$ pingg 8.8.4.4
$ pingg nieradka.net