SmokePing Open Source Network Latency Grapher
Introduction
If we talk about network quality, as i know, there are three things we should monitor:
- Latency
- Packet Loss
- Jitter
It is the time needed for the sender to send a packet and get reply. Other term is Round Trip. Propagation, Transmission, Router are affecting the Latency.
When the sender send packet but got no reply we can say it is a packet loss. A good network should have no packet loss at all.
It is the variation of the latency. Jitter more than 50ms is categorized as high jitter.
To monitor those three things we can use SmokePing by Tobias Oetiker. The guy who wrote MRTG and then RRDTOOL. It is a software for measuring latency with a lot of feature.
The idea of SmokePing is it will send several packets for every round of test. And then SmokePing will choose the median value to draw it in the graph. The variation of the round trip, it is jitter, from the test performed will be drawn in the graph as a grey color. It is called the Smoke. More fluctuation more Smoke. For the packet loss counting, SmokePing will draw different color. Here is the sample from SmokePing website:
For the real SmokePing graph you can click the graph and then zoom in to see the detailed data. As you can see the line color from green to red represent the packet loss. Another feature is allowing you to draw multihost in single graph:
Quick Howto
Read fine SmokePing Installation document written by Oiteker. At least you have to prepare for RRD Tool, FPing, Perl, Webserver, SpeedyCGI, Perl CGI::Carp Module and some optional program and perl module.
Download and Resources
2. SmokePing Installation for Debian Etch from www.howtoforge.com
3. Complete SmokePing Documentation from Tobias Oiteker
4. Tobias Oiteker Wishlist and Niko Wishlist 
5. SmokePing For Mac OSX check it in darwin port
6. And Somebody in dev.pulsed.net has a very good SmokePing installation for Windows.
