ltping — Long-Term Ping Monitor

A beautiful, real-time CLI tool for monitoring network latency over configurable time windows. Track ping statistics with live updates, color-coded metrics, and sliding window analytics.

• 📊 Sliding Window Statistics — Track metrics across multiple configurable time periods (10s, 1m, 5m, 1h, etc.)
• 🎨 Live Color-Coded Display — Green for healthy, yellow for moderate, red for critical latency/loss
• ⚡ Real-Time Updates — In-place refresh shows evolving stats as old pings age out of each window
• 🔒 No Root Required — Uses unprivileged ICMP sockets (works on most modern Linux systems)
• 📈 Comprehensive Metrics — Min/Max/Avg RTT, packet loss percentage, and network jitter
• ⌨️ Simple & Intuitive — Clean interface, sensible defaults, easy to customize

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/yourusername/ltping.git
cd ltping

# Make it executable
chmod +x ltping.py

# Run with default settings (10s / 30s / 60s windows)
python3 ltping.py google.com

• Python 3.10 or newer
• Linux with kernel support for unprivileged ICMP sockets

Most modern Linux distributions allow unprivileged ping sockets by default. If you see a "ping_group_range" error on first run, fix it with:

sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ping_group_range='0 2147483647'

To make this permanent across reboots:

echo 'net.ipv4.ping_group_range = 0 2147483647' | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf
sudo sysctl -p

# Default: monitor with 10s, 30s, and 60s windows
python3 ltping.py google.com

# Ping an IP address
python3 ltping.py 8.8.8.8

# Custom time windows
python3 ltping.py example.com -w 5s 15s 60s 5m

# Fast ping interval (500ms between pings)
python3 ltping.py 1.1.1.1 -i 0.5

# Long-term monitoring with multiple windows
python3 ltping.py example.com -w 10s 1m 5m 30m 1h

ltping [-h] [-w WINDOWS [WINDOWS ...]] [-i INTERVAL] [-t TIMEOUT] [--no-color] target

Positional arguments:
  target                Hostname or IP address to ping

Options:
  -h, --help            Show help message and exit
  -w, --windows         Time windows (e.g. 10s 30s 60s 5m 1h)
                        Default: 10s 30s 60s
  -i, --interval        Seconds between pings (default: 1.0)
  -t, --timeout         Seconds to wait for each reply (default: 2.0)
  --no-color            Disable colored output

Time windows can be specified in seconds (s), minutes (m), or hours (h):

• 10s — 10 seconds
• 5m — 5 minutes (300 seconds)
• 1h — 1 hour (3600 seconds)
• 30 — Plain numbers are treated as seconds

ltping  google.com  (142.250.80.46)  seq=42  last=15.3 ms  lifetime 42/42 (100.0%)
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
 Window   Sent   Rcvd    Loss      Min      Max      Avg   Jitter
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
    10s     10     10    0.0%    12 ms    18 ms    15 ms    2.1 ms
    30s     30     30    0.0%    12 ms    20 ms    15 ms    2.3 ms
    60s     60     59    1.7%    12 ms    25 ms    16 ms    3.1 ms
────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Press Ctrl+C to stop.

• Window — Time period for the rolling statistics
• Sent — Total pings sent in this window
• Rcvd — Pings that received a reply
• Loss — Packet loss percentage (color-coded: green = 0%, yellow < 10%, red ≥ 10%)
• Min/Max/Avg — Round-trip time statistics in milliseconds
• Jitter — Average variation between consecutive RTTs (lower is better)

Packet Loss:

• 🟢 Green: 0% loss
• 🟡 Yellow: < 10% loss
• 🟠 Orange: < 50% loss
• 🔴 Red: ≥ 50% loss

Latency (RTT):

• 🟢 Bright Green: < 20ms (excellent)
• 🔵 Cyan: 20-100ms (good)
• 🟡 Yellow: 100-300ms (moderate)
• 🔴 Red: > 300ms (high)

Jitter:

• 🟢 Green: Low variance (< 20% of average RTT)
• 🟡 Yellow: Moderate (20-50% of average)
• 🔴 Red: High variance (> 50% of average)

Monitor intermittent connectivity issues over extended periods:

python3 ltping.py gateway.local -w 1m 5m 15m 1h

Track your internet connection quality throughout the day:

python3 ltping.py 8.8.8.8 -w 5m 30m 1h 6h -i 2

Measure response time to a remote service with high-frequency pings:

python3 ltping.py api.example.com -i 0.2 -w 10s 30s 60s

Compare latency before and after VPN connection:

python3 ltping.py cloudflare.com -w 30s 2m 5m

Sliding Windows: Each time window maintains a queue of recent ping results. As new pings arrive, old ones beyond the window duration are automatically dropped. This gives you real-time insight into recent network behavior.

Unprivileged ICMP: Uses SOCK_DGRAM with IPPROTO_ICMP — the Linux kernel's ping socket API. No raw sockets required, so no root privileges needed on most systems.

Jitter Calculation: Computed as the average of absolute differences between consecutive RTTs within each window. This helps identify network instability beyond simple packet loss.

Your kernel's ping_group_range is restricted. Fix with:

sudo sysctl -w net.ipv4.ping_group_range='0 2147483647'

Or run with sudo as a one-time workaround:

sudo python3 ltping.py example.com

If you're piping output or using a non-TTY terminal, colors are automatically disabled. You can force disable with --no-color:

python3 ltping.py example.com --no-color > log.txt

By default, ltping pings once per second. If you've set a very short interval (e.g., -i 0.01), it may consume more CPU. For most monitoring scenarios, 0.2-1.0 second intervals are sufficient.

• Language: Python 3.10+
• Dependencies: Standard library only (no pip packages required)
• Protocol: ICMP Echo Request/Reply (RFC 792)
• Socket Type: AF_INET, SOCK_DGRAM, IPPROTO_ICMP
• Platform: Linux (kernel 2.6.39+)

• IPv4 only — IPv6 support is not currently implemented
• Linux only — Uses Linux-specific ping socket API (won't work on macOS/Windows without modification)
• Single target — Monitors one host at a time (run multiple instances for parallel monitoring)

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request. For major changes, please open an issue first to discuss what you would like to change.

MIT License — see LICENSE file for details.

• Inspired by traditional ping and network monitoring tools
• Built with a focus on real-time visualization and user experience

• ping — The original ICMP echo utility
• mtr — Network diagnostic tool combining ping and traceroute
• iperf — Network bandwidth measurement tool

Made with ❤️ for network engineers, sysadmins, and anyone who needs to know if their internet is actually working.