MultiPing: A pure-python implemention to monitor IP addresses with pings

MultiPing is a Python library to monitor one or many IP addresses via ICMP echo (ping) requests. Features:

• It works for Python 2 and 3.
• Supports timeouts and retries.
• Supports IPv4 as well as IPv6.
• Small and compact and does not rely on any 3rd party packages, aside from what's included in Python.

It is ideally suited to monitor large numbers of hosts in clusters, but is just as suitable to check on a single address.

MultiPing was originally developed for the vpc-router project, but can easily be used on its own.

Installation

Installation via pip

MultiPing is available in PyPi, the Python Package Index. Therefore, you can install it simply with:

pip install multiping

Installation from source

After downloading the code or cloning this repository, please run the setup.py file, which is included in the source code:

python setup.py install

Contributions

We welcome any contributions, bug reports or feedback. Please use our issue tracker to file bugs or request additional features. We are happy to consider pull requests as well.

Using MultiPing

Note: ICMP packets can only be sent by processes with root privileges.

Here is an example of how to use MultiPing in your own code:

from multiping import MultiPing

# Create a MultiPing object to test three hosts / addresses
mp = MultiPing(["8.8.8.8", "youtube.com", "127.0.0.1"])

# Send the pings to those addresses
mp.send()

# With a 1 second timout, wait for responses (may return sooner if all
# results are received).
responses, no_responses = mp.receive(1)

The receive() function returns a tuple containing a results dictionary (addresses with response times and retry) as well as a list of addresses that did not respond in time. The results may be processed like this:

...

for addr, result in responses.items():
    print "%s responded in %f seconds (retry=%d)" % (addr, result['time'], result['retry'])

if no_responses:
    print "These addresses did not respond: %s" % ", ".join(no_responses)
    # Sending pings once more, but just to those addresses that have not
    # responded, yet. The MultiPing object 'mp' remembers the state of
    # which address has responded already, so that another call to
    # send() just generates packets to those hosts from which we haven't
    # heard back, yet.
    mp.send()
    responses, no_responses = mp.receive(1)

    ...

Note that send() can be called multiple times. If there are any addresses left for which no response has been received yet then this will resend pings to those remaining addresses.

A convenient multi_ping() function is provided, which implements retries and delivers results in a single and simple function call:

from multiping import multi_ping

addrs = ["8.8.8.8", "youtube.com", "127.0.0.1"]

# Ping the addresses up to 4 times (initial ping + 3 retries), over the
# course of 2 seconds. This means that for those addresses that do not
# respond another ping will be sent every 0.5 seconds.
responses, no_responses = multi_ping(addrs, timeout=2, retry=3)

Also see the demo.py file for more examples.

If there are any names or addresses in the list of target addresses, which cannot be resolved or looked up, a socket.gaierror is raised. This can be surpressed if the silent_lookup_errors parameter flag is set. Either as named parameter for the multi_ping function or when a MultiPing object is created.

To avoid burst issues with packet loss on some networks, the delay parameter can be used with the multi_ping function or when a MultiPing object is created. This delay in seconds will be applied between every ICMP request. For milliseconds delay simply use floating number, e.g.: 0.001 for 1 ms.