Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

This is quite neat trick, as part of my standard home office setup I have a window on one of my screens showing a realtime gping to an Internet DNS server and my router, this allows me to quickly see if I have a burst of Internet latency, or maybe a home LAN/router problem – this is really useful when presenting something in Teams or similar as you can see real-time where you may have a problem without having to fire up a terminal and go fishing.

I discovered today that you can also use gping to graph the response time of a command, for example the docs give the example of gping –cmd ‘ls’ ‘ls /’ to show the differences between those two commands.

You can use this method to extend your simple real-time monitor beyond just ICMP (ping) by calling the command line http tool curl. this is possible because curl exits when it returns the HTTP payload from the server you point it at.

For example, using this command

gping --cmd 'curl http://www.google.co.uk' 'curl http://bing.com' 'curl www.yahoo.com'     

..you can monitor response times from 3 popular Internet search engines from your PC. (yes, there are global load balancers and other infrastructure which can [re-]route the traffic transparently to you) but it’s a very simple and useful measure of your end-user experience of latency from where you are on the Internet to places you use.