heartbit

heartbit is a command-line tool designed for network monitoring.

It takes a list of IP addresses or hostname as input and periodically pings them using ICMP (ping).

Unlike traditional ping utilities that flood the console with output, heartbit is designed for quiet monitoring.

It only prints output when a monitored host's status changes.

Specifically, it reports when a host becomes unreachable (packet loss or completely down) or when a previously unreachable host comes back online.

This concise, event-driven reporting makes heartbit ideal for unattended monitoring and integration with alerting systems, allowing administrators to focus on actual network issues rather than sifting through constant ping output.

It can be configured to adjust ping intervals and timeout, providing more flexible control over sensitivity and responsiveness.

Very simple tool that keep sending icmp packet to a list of ipv4 or ipv6 hosts, and display flip/flap icmp status changes, and packet loss.

Original idea code stolen from github.com/digineo/go-ping/cmd/ping-monitor

• It Need root rights on linux for sending icmp packets ( or sudo, or chown root binary , chmod u+s binary after build )

Go build

> git clone https://github.com/thc2cat/heartbit 
> cd heartbit 
> go mod tidy 
> go build

Options

v0.11 $ ./heartbit.exe 
Usage: C:\dev\src\projects\heartbit\heartbit.exe [options] [hosts...]
  -dateFormat string
        log date format (default "2006-01-02 15:04:05")
  -logToSyslog
        log events to syslog
  -noLossReport
        do not report summary
  -pingInterval duration
        interval for ICMP echo requests (default 1s)
  -pingTimeout duration
        timeout for ICMP echo request (default 3s)
  -r string
        read targets from file
  -reportInterval duration
        interval for reports (default 5s)
  -showIp
        show monitored targets name resolution
  -size uint
        size of additional payload data (default 56)
  -stopAfter duration
        test duration (example 10m) (default 8760h0m0s)
  -t    be tolerant, allow 1 packet loss per check

monitoring a list of hosts from a file

heartbit -pingInterval 5s -r hosts.txt

Colored output exemple (v7) with multiple names in cli

• Green for a host receiving all packets during interval
• Red for a host loosing all packets during interval
• Yellow for a host up but loosing packets during interval, [Received/Sent/Percent] indicate x received packet for y sent packets during interval. Percent indicate percentage of received packets since start.