Interiris

Measure how reliable your internet connection is.

This tool will automatically locate the first hop outside your own network, and use ping to measure the latency to that hop. It will record latency and packet drops, and we also include an example Grafana dashboard that you can use to visualize the results.

This project relies on a setup of Prometheus and Grafana, and includes examples of how to get them set up.

This project is built with the Netdiag and Metrics crates. Kentik Labs has a good blog post about their Netdiag crate.

Get a release

If you're running Linux - you can download a binary release from Github. You can also build it easily yourself, either to a binary or a docker image.

Building a binary

If you want to build the binary yourself, you'll need to have Rust installed. For that, you can follow the instructions on the Rust website to install Rust. Then:

For a debug build:

make

For a release build:

make release

You'll find the debug build in target/debug and the release build in target/release, depending on what you chose.

Running

If you've got a debug build:

RUST_LOG=info ./target/debug/interiris

if you want backtraces available in case of a crash:

RUST_BACKTRACE=1 RUST_LOG=info ./target/debug/interiris

If you have a release build, replace debug in the path with release.

While it's not necessary, I would recommend running with RUST_LOG=info - there are multiple log levels available described in the env_logger crate docs.

If you want to run the docker image, use:

docker run -it -p 9000:9000 --name interiris --rm ghcr.io/anglerud/interiris:latest

Building a docker image

The provided docker image should make it easy to build a docker image:

Either:

make docker

or:

docker build -t interiris:latest .

Further usage

The default options are likely to be good enough, but there are some options to tweak the behavior.

Usage: interiris [OPTIONS]

Optional arguments:
  -h, --help
  -p, --proto PROTO    Protocol to use to find first public IP: ICMP, UDP, or TCP (default: ICMP)
  -P, --probe-port PROBE-PORT
                       Port the TCP or UDP trace probe will connect to. Required for TCP or UDP
  -c, --count COUNT    Retries while tracing to first public IP (default: 4)
  -d, --delay DELAY    Time between monitoring pings (default: 500)
  -l, --limit LIMIT    Max network hops before giving up finding a public IP (default: 30)
  -e, --expiry EXPIRY  Max time to wait for a network reply (default: 250)

Using

The monitor will expose metrics on port 9000. In order to make use of these metrics, you will need Prometheus set up, and a dashboard to visualize them. I provide a Grafana dashboard you can import to get started.

Prometheus

You can find out how to get Prometheus at https://prometheus.io/. Running it is very simple, and I would recommend downloading the appropriate install for your operating system, then adding a job definition to the scrape_configs section of your prometheus.yml configuration file that looks like this:

- job_name: "internet"

  static_configs:
    - targets: ["localhost:9000"]

Then run the Prometheus binary with ./prometheus.

Grafana

To visualize the data collected by Prometheus, grab Grafana.

There are multiple ways for you to deploy Grafana, but I find the easiest way to run it is with Docker, if you have that available. I launch Grafana with:

$ mkdir grafana_data
$ docker run -it --rm -p 3000:3000 --user $(id -u) --volume "${PWD}/grafana_data:/var/lib/grafana" \
    --name grafana grafana/grafana-oss:9.5.1

You can then access Grafana on http://localhost:3000/. The default username and password are both "admin".

You will need to set up a new data source called "Prometheus". You can do that under "Administration -> Data Sources", which is accessible via the left-hand hamburger menu. Select Prometheus, and update the HTTP URL parameter to http://<your ip>:9090/. You can get your IP with ip a on Linux. You can leave the other settings as default.

Next - import the sample dashboard by clicking the + top right in Grafana.

You're now done - you should be able to see your ping data coming in! You'll be able to see:

• average ping time over time
• packet drops over time
• the current distribution of ping times
• percentile distributions over time

The name

Latin - I go among, become lost in.