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: If you do not have an alert rule that alerts on device status, enabling this will be a waste of resources. 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.
- This will flush all pending writes so that the rrdstep.php script can change the steps.
2: Change the ping_rrd_step setting in config.php
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
* * * * * 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
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 alert.php entries)
* * * * * 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