Ping system test

2 minute read

Posted 2021-06-26 - Updated 2021-07-05
Supported on Linux, Aix, MacOS

Ping test (Line that begin with ‘ping_’)

To execute a ping test, the column one must begin with ‘ping_’ follow by the tcp/ip address or the hostname you would like to ping. Example, to ping ‘www.google.com’ the column one would be “ping_www.google.com”. This will ping the ‘www.google.com’ web site and return a 0 if it ping, if not a 1 and the result is always place in column 2. Worth mentioning that the ping tries three times to ping (ping -c3) before indicating an error. It the example below we can see that ‘www.google.com’ did respond to the ping (column 2 = 0) and that ‘www.ibm.com’ did not respond to our ping (column 2 = 1).

# Ping server (Return 0=Ok 1=Error) 
# ID COLUMN 1       2  3  4  5  6    7   8   9 A B C D E F G     H      I     J        K        L
ping_www.google.com 0  = 01 00 000 0000 0000 Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y 00000000 0000 default sms_sysadmin -
ping_www.ibm.com    1  = 00 01 000 0000 0000 Y Y Y Y Y Y Y Y 00000000 0000 default sms_sysadmin -
#
  • If ‘www.google.com” didn’t respond to the ping, we would get a ´1´ in column 2 and it would equal (column 3) to the ‘1’ in column 4, this means that a warning alert would be issue to the ‘default’ alert group specify in column ‘J’. If the Alert group file was define like below, with the ‘default’ group having a type ‘m’, then an email would be sent to the “mail_webteam” with contain two emails addresses “webteam@acme.com, sysadmin@acme.com”, so these two addresses would receive an email alert.
  • In ‘www.ibm.com’ example below, we can see that the ping to ‘www.ibm.com’ didn’t work (column 2 = 1) and we see that the ‘Error’ threshold is also set to ‘1’ and the test to do between these two values is ‘=’. So the result (column 2) is ‘1’, the test (column 3) is ‘=’, the ‘warning’ threshold (column 4) is ‘0’ (So we forget about it), and the ‘Error’ threshold (column 5) is ‘1’, so this generate ‘Error’ alert. The ‘Error’ alert will be send to the alert group specify in column ‘K’ witch is ‘sms_sysadmin’. So a SMS Alert would be sent to the “sms_sysadmin” group which contain one member “cell_john_doe”, so the SMS will go to the cellular number ‘5147577706’.
default             m   mail_webteam
#
# Email Alert Group 
mail_sysadmin       m   sysadmin@acme.com
mail_webteam        m   webteam@acme.com,sysadmin@acme.com 
#
# SMS (Texto) Alert Group, members are Cellular name
sms_sysadmin        t   cell_john_doe  
#
# Cellular number of individual (Use only in SMS alert group)
cell_john_doe       c   5147577706
  • We state before that column 4 is the ‘Warning’ value or threshold and that column 5 is the ‘Error’ value or threshold. Whenever one of these value is zero, it means that there no threshold for that column and that it will not be evaluated.

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See also

Link to … Description
sadm_sysmon_tui.pl Command line summary of alerts and failed scripts of all your servers.
sadm_sysmon.pl Client system monitor
sadm_fetch_clients.sh rsync all .rch/.log/.rpt from actives clients to the SADMIN server
SysMon configuration file Client System Monitor configuration file
sadmin.cfg SADMIN main configuration file

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