pingg

Graphical ping utility to monitor your internet connection quality. Works on macOS, BSD and Linux.

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 get the point.

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

ping	pingg

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 graphically 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 executable 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, ping, awk, stty, uname and sleep. All of them should be available in any modern unix-alike operating system. It works on macOS/BSD (ping -t) and Linux (ping -W, iputils).

Brew/macOS install

pingg is a valid Homebrew formula:

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 zenfeed.eu