pingmonitor 1.0.0

TUI monitor of latency and availability to servers by country

pingmon

A full-featured terminal UI for monitoring latency and availability to servers in different countries. Built with Textual.

It continuously TCP-pings a set of targets (one or more reachable hosts per country), and shows a live, colour-coded dashboard with per-target latency, average, jitter, packet loss, a status indicator, and an animated trend graph.

Features

• Live dashboard — sortable table of targets with status dot, latency, average, loss and an inline coloured sparkline trend.
• Detail panel — for the selected target: live latency graph, quality gauge, min / max / avg / jitter / loss, MOS call-quality score, resolved IP, GeoIP city / region and the hosting network (ASN + ISP), sample count.
• ★ Region Advisor (unique) — ranks regions by a composite 0–100 score under a chosen use-case profile (VoIP / Gaming / Web / Bulk) and highlights the best region to pick right now. Press g. See below.
• MOS / R-factor — turns latency + jitter + loss into the single VoIP call-quality number (ITU-T E-model), the same metric paid monitoring suites charge for.
• Threshold alerts — fire when a target stays slow or lossy for N samples: terminal bell, an in-app toast, an OS desktop notification, and a blinking row marker. Auto-clears on recovery.
• Traceroute drill-down — press Enter (or click) on a row for an mtr-style hop-by-hop path with per-hop loss and per-probe timings, plus GeoIP per hop (flag, city and ASN) so you can see which countries and networks the traffic crosses.
• Per-country set, ready to go — the Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, France, Cyprus, Italy, Spain, Greece, Sweden, Ireland and the United States are pre-configured with reachable hosts.
• Editable targets — add (a), edit (E) and delete (d) targets right inside the TUI, or edit the TOML config by hand; reset stats with r. In-app changes are saved to the config immediately.
• GeoIP auto-detect & enrichment — every target is looked up via ip-api.com: the detail panel shows its city, region and hosting network (ASN + ISP), and when you add a target with country/flag left blank they are filled in automatically.
• Show filter — flip the table between all, mine only (targets you added) and others only (the built-in set) with f.
• No root required — uses TCP connect timing (port 443/80), so it works without raw-socket / ICMP privileges and measures real service latency.
• Modern terminal UX — truecolor, mouse support, zebra-striped table, a live "heartbeat" spinner, keyboard and mouse navigation, sort modes and modal dialogs.

Region Advisor	Traceroute drill-down

Requirements

• Python 3.11+ (not needed for the standalone binary below)
• textual >= 0.80 (installed automatically)

Install as a system command

Use it like htop — install once, run pingmon from anywhere.

pipx / uv (recommended, Linux + macOS)

pipx install pingmon            # from PyPI once published
pipx install .                  # or from a checkout of this repo
pipx install git+https://github.com/kottot13/pingmon
# uv works the same:  uv tool install pingmon   /   uvx pingmon

pipx keeps pingmon in its own isolated environment and puts the pingmon command on your PATH.

Homebrew (macOS / Linuxbrew)

A formula skeleton lives in packaging/pingmon.rb. Publish to PyPI, fill in the sdist URL + brew update-python-resources, then:

brew install kottot13/tap/pingmon

Standalone binary (no Python on the target)

The most htop-like option — a single executable built with PyInstaller (packaging/pingmon.spec):

pip install pyinstaller
pyinstaller packaging/pingmon.spec
sudo cp dist/pingmon /usr/local/bin/     # macOS
cp dist/pingmon ~/.local/bin/            # Linux

Build once per OS/architecture (PyInstaller does not cross-compile).

From source (development)

./run.sh                # makes a local venv, installs Textual, launches
# or
python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -e . && .venv/bin/pingmon

Config lives at ~/.config/pingmon/config.toml by default (or a local ./config.toml if present, or $PINGMON_CONFIG). Run pingmon --help for the CLI flags (-V/--version, -c/--config PATH).

Keys

Key	Action
↑ / ↓, j/k	Move selection
Enter	Traceroute drill-down for the selected target
g	Open the Region Advisor ([ ] / p switch profile inside)
p	Cycle the Advisor profile (VoIP / Gaming / Web / Bulk)
f	Cycle the show filter (all / mine only / others only)
space	Pause / resume probing
m / M	Sort by latency (ms); press again to flip fastest ⇄ slowest first
s	Cycle sort (country / latency / loss / jitter)
a	Add a target
E	Edit the selected target (form pre-filled)
A	Toggle the alert system on / off
d	Delete the selected target
r	Reset all statistics
e	Show the config file path
q	Quit

Region Advisor

The Advisor (g) answers the question the tool was born from — which region should I actually pick right now? It computes a 0–100 score per region from latency, jitter and loss, under a selectable profile:

Profile	What it optimises for
VoIP / Video call	jitter & loss dominate; driven by the MOS / E-model score
Gaming	raw latency + jitter, loss punished hard
Web / API	latency-led, mild loss penalty
Bulk / Backup	loss-led, tolerant of high latency

Regions are ranked best-first with the #1 pick highlighted, each with a score bar, a letter grade (A–F) and a one-line reason. Switch profile with [ / ], p or Tab; close with Esc.

Alerts

A target enters alert state when, for alert_window consecutive samples, it is unreachable, slower than alert_latency ms, or its recent loss exceeds alert_loss %. On entry pingmon rings the terminal bell, shows a toast, raises an OS desktop notification (macOS osascript / Linux notify-send, toggle with desktop_notify) and blinks the row's status marker; it auto-clears with a "Recovered" toast. Press A to switch the whole alert system off or on at any time (the banner shows ⚲ alerts off while disabled); tune or permanently disable the triggers in config.toml.

Status colours

Status	Meaning (last sample)
EXCELLENT	< 40 ms
GOOD	< 90 ms
FAIR	< 180 ms
POOR	< 350 ms / ≥ 350 ms
UNSTABLE	loss ≥ 20% or a recent drop
DOWN	3+ consecutive failures
PENDING	no samples yet

Configuration

On first run a config.toml is created at ~/.config/pingmon/config.toml (or a local ./config.toml if one already exists, or wherever $PINGMON_CONFIG / --config points). It is plain TOML and meant to be hand-edited:

interval = 2.0        # poll period per target, seconds
timeout  = 2.0        # TCP connect timeout, seconds
history  = 90         # samples kept in memory for the graph

alert_latency = 300.0 # alert if latency stays above this (ms); 0 disables
alert_loss    = 20.0  # alert if recent loss exceeds this (%); 0 disables
alert_window  = 3     # consecutive bad samples before an alert fires
desktop_notify = true # also raise an OS desktop notification on alert

[[targets]]
country = "Netherlands"
flag = "🇳🇱"
host = "speedtest.ams1.nl.leaseweb.net"
port = 80
source = "builtin"   # "builtin" (shipped) or "user" (added in-app) — drives the `f` filter

[[targets]]
country = "United States"
flag = "🇺🇸"
host = "speedtest.newark.linode.com"
port = 443
source = "builtin"

Add as many [[targets]] blocks as you like; any host or IP works, and the port is per-target. source is optional — if omitted it is inferred (hosts in the built-in set are builtin, everything else user).

How latency is measured

pingmon opens a TCP connection to host:port and times the round-trip of the connection handshake (SYN → SYN/ACK). That is close to true network RTT and, unlike ICMP, needs no elevated privileges and reflects whether the service port is actually answering. Failed or timed-out connects count as packet loss.

Project layout

pingmon/
  app.py      # Textual app: table, detail panel, graphs, advisor, alerts, actions
  pinger.py   # async TCP ping + DNS resolve
  stats.py    # rolling per-target stats (latency, jitter, loss, MOS, status)
  scoring.py  # Region Advisor: composite score + use-case profiles
  netutil.py  # async traceroute + OS desktop notifications
  render.py   # colours, status meta, text sparklines
  config.py   # TOML load/save + built-in per-country target set
  app.tcss    # dark theme / layout