Fast up/down checking

Normally, LibreNMS sends an ICMP ping to the device before polling to check if it is up or down. This check is tied to the poller frequency, which is normally 5 minutes. This means it may take up to 5 minutes to find out if a device is down.

Some users may want to know if devices stop responding to ping more quickly than that. LibreNMS offers a ping.php script to run ping checks as quickly as possible without increasing snmp load on your devices by switching to 1 minute polling.

Warning

You likely want to have a device down alert rule to take advantage of Fast Ping checks. You can find one in the Alert Rules Collection.

Setting the ping check to 1 minute

1: If you are using RRDCached, stop the service.

Note

This will flush all pending writes so that the rrdstep.php script can change the steps.

2: Change the ping_rrd_step setting in WebUI or CLI

poller/rrdtool

lnms config:set ping_rrd_step 60

3: Update the rrd files to change the step (step is hardcoded at file creation in rrd files)

./scripts/rrdstep.php -h all

4: Add the following line to /etc/cron.d/librenms to allow 1 minute ping checks

/etc/cron.d/librenms

*    *    * * *   librenms    /opt/librenms/ping.php >> /dev/null 2>&1

5: If applicable: Start the RRDCached service

Note

If you are using distributed pollers you can restrict a poller to a group by appending -g to the cron entry. Alternatively, you should only run ping.php on a single node.

Sub minute ping check

Cron only has a resolution of one minute, so for sub-minute ping checks we need to adapt both ping and alerts entries. We add two entries per function, but add a delay before one of these entries.

Remember, you need to remove the original ping.php and alerts.php entries in crontab before proceeding!

1: Set ping_rrd_step setting in WebUI or CLI

poller/rrdtool

lnms config:set ping_rrd_step 30

2: Update the rrd files

./scripts/rrdstep.php -h all

3: Update cron (removing any other ping.php or alerts.php entries)

/etc/cron.d/librenms

*    *    * * *   librenms    /opt/librenms/ping.php >> /dev/null 2>&1
*    *    * * *   librenms    sleep 30 && /opt/librenms/ping.php >> /dev/null 2>&1
*    *    * * *   librenms    sleep 15 && /opt/librenms/alerts.php >> /dev/null 2>&1
*    *    * * *   librenms    sleep 45 && /opt/librenms/alerts.php >> /dev/null 2>&1

Device dependencies

The ping.php script respects device dependencies, but the main poller does not (for technical reasons). However, using this script does not disable the icmp check in the poller and a child may be reported as down before the parent.

Settings

ping.php uses much the same settings as the poller fping with one exception: retries is used instead of count. ping.php does not measure loss and avg response time, only up/down, so once a device responds it stops pinging it.

poller/ping

lnms config:set fping_options.retries 2
lnms config:set fping_options.timeout 500
lnms config:set fping_options.interval 500