ckatsak / netspeedmon

Command line utility to periodically measure, plot and report network statistics.

netspeedmon

Command line utility to periodically measure, plot and report network statistics.

^{Disclaimer: Working, but not polished; developed mostly for educational purposes.}

Quick build

• Minimum Supported Rust Version: 1.54.0

• You may need to install cmake and the FreeType 2 font engine (packages cmake and libfreetype6-dev on Debian).

• Assuming Rust is already installed in the system, build the fully-featured (and thus heavier) netspeedmon binary by issuing:

$ cargo build --all-features --release

or try any other valid combination of the supported Cargo features (also kinda enumerated in the included Makefile) according to your needs (which can lead to slimmer binaries).

Measuring

Measurements can be acquired either by calling an external speedtest binary with certain characteristics, or by using the zpeters/speedtestr crate.

Binary speedtest

This is the default Measurer.

It is assumed that a speedtest binary exists in PATH, which is run by netspeedmon in a manner equivalent to:

$ speedtest --format json --accept-gdpr

It is assumed that this binary reports its results serialized in JSON format on stdout. Binary's stderr is never parsed, although it is being logged when it is not empty.

Furthermore, it is assumed that, in speedtest binary's output on stdout, at least the following information can be found:

• In case of a successful execution:

{
    "ping": {
        "latency": float (milliseconds)
    },
    "download": {
        "bandwidth": int (bytes per second)
    },
    "upload": {
        "bandwidth": int (bytes per second)
    }
}

• In case of an unsuccessful execution:

{
    "error": "string"
}

In both cases, these are then parsed by netspeedmon.

Ookla's Speedtest CLI is obviously a great candidate for this, for now.

Crate zpeters/speedtestr

To use this crate, first make sure that the Cargo feature zpeters has been enabled during the build.

Then, mind to specify the alternative measurer in the configuration file.

Plotting

Optional feature, using the plotters crate.

To enable plotting, make sure that:

• the Cargo feature plot has been enabled during the build;
• a database path has been specified in the configuration file (which is otherwise optional).

Plot images are in PNG format if the twitter Cargo feature is enabled, or SVG otherwise.

Results are plotted only when at least 2 measurements are available.

Reporting

Results can periodically be:

• stored by a database implementation (although only a naive in-memory implementation exists, for now) (this is necessary to enable plotting the time series, but optional otherwise);
• written to stdout (configurable through a boolean on the configuration file);
• served via HTTP, on the /latest and /plot endpoints (Cargo feature http required);
• tweeted to the configured Twitter account (Cargo feature twitter required).

Logs are sent to stderr. Logging level is configurable through the RUST_LOG environment variable.

You may want to redirect stderr to make the output on stdout easier to look at.

Configuration

netspeedmon is configured when its execution begins through the configuration file pointed by the command line flag (try passing --help for more).

Some examples of what a valid configuration file may look like are included in this repository.

It is advisable that the periodic check is not configured to take place too often.

License

Distributed under the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0.

For further details consult the included LICENSE file or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.

Of course, any other library or binary that is or can be used along with this project may be subject to terms of some different license(s).