The pingbox, rewritten
The headline this month is pingboxd, a ground-up rewrite of the agent that does the actual pinging, polling, and latency monitoring on your network. Alongside it, the real-time ping test was redesigned to stream results live while you watch.
pingboxd: a new monitoring agent New
The pingbox agent was rewritten from the ground up as a small native daemon: a single static binary that runs on anything, syncs over MQTT, keeps its own time with NTP, and manages SSH sessions to your gear far more carefully. Rolled out fleet-wide this month.
The old agent was a collection of scripts; the new one is a single static binary written in C — it starts in milliseconds, uses a fraction of the memory, scales its traffic-analysis tables dynamically, and is much more disciplined about SSH: sessions to the same device are reused, commands are hard-capped at 60 seconds, and connection failures are reported correctly in more circumstances than before.
New real-time ping tests New
The real-time ping test tool has been in Swift Fox since the very start, and it was beginning to show its age. It's been fully redesigned on the frontend and backend to be more reliable and easier to use. You can now ping infrastructure devices in addition to CPEs, and select which pingbox you're pinging from.
Updated TCP latency on customer pages Improved
Live TCP latency monitoring and traces are now sourced from the new pingbox backend, enriched with geolocation and ASN lookups.
RB5009UPr voltage monitoring New
MikroTik RB5009UPr routers report supply voltage as a monitored metric.