The smokeping Configuration Script

The configuration script for smokeping contains the following sections:

General: The General section defines the directory and file locations for rrdtool data, images, sendmail, and smokemail. Email addresses and URL information are also specified in this section. Many of these configuration values are mandatory for the operation of smokeping. It will not work correctly if they are not changed to match your specific configuration.

Database: The Database section defines how often smokeping will poll a device in seconds (step) and how many attempts will be made during that poll period (pings). The default ping setting is to send 20 requests at a step rate of 300 seconds (5 minutes). Smokeping not only records the round-trip latency for each request, but also records whether a request was lost. The rrdtool database is defined here as well. This informs RRD of how it should store and consolidate the data over time.

Presentation: The Presentation section is used to specify the sizes of the overview and detail graphs. It also controls the ranges for each of the details graphs in hours or days. The default settings for the four detail graphs are: 3 hours, 30 hours, 10 days, and 400 days. These can be change to meet your needs.

Probes: Smokeping doesn't provide any tools for probing the network services to determine latency. The external applications like fping and echoping are defined here. The full path to each binary is specified for the smokeping application to use for each probe type: ping, http, https, and smtp.

Targets: The Targets are the devices and servers to monitor for latency by smokeping. The targets are organized into sections in a hierarchical order. Each section starts at level 1 with a single plus (+) sign and the section name. A menu name and title can also be defined for this level and higher levels. Using additional plus signs delineates higher levels. The probe is configured for each section at either level 1 or level 2. It references the probe defined in the probe section of the configuration file. It also defines in more detail about how the probe is supposed to work for this section. The target host can be defined at any level for smokeping to obtain the latency information. The host can be specified as an IP address or as a hostname.