Netout
Netout pings a host and logs outages to a file.
Use netout to ping 8.8.8.8:
netout
That logs any problems pinging 8.8.8.8 (google-public-dns-a.google.com) to outages_8.8.8.8.txt, e.g.:
Outage started 2015-03-13 22:05:56 -0400 (No route to host) and ended 2015-03-13 22:06:06 -0400
Outage started 2015-03-13 22:06:12 -0400 (No route to host) and ended 2015-03-13 22:06:16 -0400
Outage started 2015-03-13 22:06:32 -0400 (No route to host) and ended 2015-03-13 22:06:36 -0400
In a separate process, you can tail -f the file to get output.
If you'd rather use netout to ping 10.0.0.1 and logs any problems pinging 10.0.0.1 to outages_10.0.0.1.txt:
netout 10.0.0.1
Note that the output of netout is not 100% accurate:
- Long ping times (over 500ms by default) would be considered an outage, when they could just be higher latency.
- The reason specified for the outage is only the first error that comes back from what is assumed to be a failed ping. If the reason for the outage changes over time, the new reasons aren't logged.
How to use
Ensure that Ruby is installed/available and then put the netout script somewhere in your path.
How it works
Netout is a Ruby script that uses popen to call ping -t500 ('8.8.8.8' or provided args) 2>&1 and watches the stdout and stderr streams. If it notices an outage start or recovery it logs those immediately to a file.
License
Copyright (c) 2015, Gary S. Weaver, released under the GNU General Public License version 3 as published by the Free Software Foundation.