Network Diagnostic via Ping

I've run a few. Settled on Librenms a few years ago. Good SNMP support for hosts, switches, access points, and the like. Built-in alerting. Docker hub distribution.

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Opinion - Not a supporter of the idea. The world is full of products that try to solve too many problems with one answer. Like nails, not all hammers are right for the job.
While recent addition of some basic IP network stuff has been added, it's an attempt to be pertinent to the needs of the HE. I'd rather see a more robust file management feature with cifs or something!
As to the question of 'which NMS'. a very old product called Dude was written years back by a router OS company and it's still my favorite solution. Logging, support of port monitoring, and SNMP. Visual display of net with drill down capability. It's old. but it's free! (i've images of a 320 camera network with a 10G backbone I built for a state prison but I can't find them!)

In today's world you must Elon Musk a product. What sets it apart from the rest. 2nd Ping isn't much of a ask to get working. No reason that this device can't have it built into a rule or a device indicator. Not everyone will run a NMS and also these types of boxes can be placed in a business application where other servers are not deployed and reduce costs.

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Imma put it like dis... 30% of what I used my trusty-but-graying Vera Plus hub for was pinging. Using a 3rd party plug-in suited to the task, with a child [switch] device for each local or remote IP I cared to monitor. Perfect for automations triggered by some network device or service dropping offline.

Example: Plex server; Synology NAS; Google WiFi AP; Alexa Echo Dots (well, they require arp, so no bueno); Docker containers; Ooma Telo; surveillance cameras; Ring devices; cellphones; smart TVs; shall I go on? All perfectly tied to HA IMHO, particularly around presence detection (e.g. some of my monitored devices belong to an elderly relative, so MSR kicks me a warning message if none gets used during a 24-hour period).

Point is, I crank up my Hubitat yesterday for the first time and come in here looking for reasons why it can't (yet, or natively) do some of the exotic-for-2009-but-not-2021 things we had Vera doing, with nary the impact on network traffic, CPU or RAM resources.

And not just ping, but cool things like Wake-On-LAN, TTS via Alexa, Roku control ... sure, I know apps have been written for the HE (precisely the kind of search that brought me here tonight), but I naively thought Hubitat offered all those features stock, LOL. Because marketing hype.

Ergo I heartily +1 the ask in the OP. Bring the Ping!

Well this is a 7 month old post, they have added icmp calls since then, I think it’s even an action in rule machine now.

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Considering this thread is many months old.... they added the routines for developers to utilize ping in apps/drivers. And they added a ping action to rule macine. Hopefully thats what you are looking for.

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Dang, and nobody said a word here? Ha ha

Thanks. Will go explore that avenue...

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It was listed in the change logs...

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My Hubitat and Konnected are working just fine. I just found this topic after experimenting with NEMS on a RPi4. NEMS is way overkill and IMHO unpleasant. If I can remotely work the Hubitat app, then my modem, router, and the Hubitat are working. The only device not verified in this way is my Konnected board and the switch which powers it. So, a simple periodic ping test of the Konnected board would test the last xxx feet of my network. All NEMS was going to do is a ping anyway.

Easy to run ping in a RM app, but no result is provided. So, I found and added the "Hubitat Ping" driver.

I find little information on how to actually use "Hubitat Ping" that make sense. Anyone have a link to a RM example or something I can start from? Ideally a failure from the ping test would allow me to send a Pushover message (for example).

Thanks,

If you're talking about this one:

I may be able to answer your questions. Easiest way to kick off a notification or message using this would be to set the Ping Repeat to a timeframe that you feel is reasonable, save the change, and then enter the IP address you want to have checked and hit Send Ping. After that it's just a matter of setting up a rule that is triggered by the presence attribute (may be under Custom Attributes in RM) going to not present, with an action of send notification.

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Belated reading of this thread. Your post is a great outline of why this was a worthwhile add.

The automations/actions that could be readily handled with this info available to HE are more than what first come to mind.

It's more work for somebody(s) but wouldn't it be neat to somehow have change log tie-backs to threads that discussed the very issue/feature/request/desire.

That way you could read the change log and find the related contextual discussions that led to it. Or stumble upon the key thread(s) and see a link to the resulting change logs.

Looks like I have to learn Groovy to complete this. Easy in RM to send the pings periodically, I'm using 15 minutes as there is a low expectation of failure. Another RM using the cron option runs two minutes later to check, but I found no way to check the ping result in RM.
Thanks for the reply, this will open up a new set of opportunities to get the most out of my HE.
Cheers and Happy Holidays!

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See it as an opportunity if nothing else.... In the meantime you will either come up with a way to translate it to RM, there will become available a way to achieve what you want, or you / someone else will come up with a solution using RM.

Thinking about it some more, I use ping to assess the availability of my hubs... now I'm re-thinking my setup....

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Are you volunteering to help?

I have seen staff post updates in dozens of threads to let users know that a promised feature request or bug fix was subsequently included in a firmware update. That always impresses me. It must be hard to catch 100% of those threads though.

Collaborate on a tagging construct that might make it easier, sure.

I didn't expect every single thread would be picked up but if feature/capability ideas come in part from reading some of these threads, and said ideas make a development short list or active fix list, perhaps tagging it (right then and there) in a manner that allows subsequent and automatic linking to future release notes is how to go about this. Something to ponder.

If you use the device driver not really. Couple different ways of triggering RM from it:

  1. If presence changes to not present
  2. If responseReady changes to ready
  3. If percentLoss changes or changes to
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I think I've got it. Added a device for Hubitat Ping and using the presence signal as a start. In test now, will work it out.

I still will try to get some groovy in my mental tool basket. Retired software engineer and manager in embedded comms. Never programmed Java, lots of C and such.

Thanks for your support and help. Get more and more pleased I went with Hubitat for my alarm integration as I do more with it. I'm trying to convince some friends to go this route as well.

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Groovy is fairly easy if you've done C# or Java; syntax is C-ish (C++ is closer), but if (more like when if you're like me) you get stuck, just holler here in the community and one of us will chime in...

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The RM and device definition was really easy. But, I ran into unexpected problems with the device.

Hope these pasted screen captures show up.

The graphic shows the IP address and the test result from the "Send Ping" button.

However, when I hit the " Save Device" or "Save Preferences" buttons, the screen changes to:

The IP address has vanished and was replaced with a red line.

The Log below shows several things.

  1. At 18:15:00.247 the RM rule ran
  2. At 18:30:00:238 the RM rule ran
  3. At 18:45:00:247 the RM rule ran
  4. At 18:46:29.213 I ran the ping from the device screen as shown above. It works.

Additionally, while collecting test results, I disconnected the Konnected board Ethernet cable from the POE switch. Same results.

So I'm not sure what is going on. The ping works, I'm sure about the device and therefore the RM rule. Don't understand why the device blanks the IP address field when I save it,