Feature Idea: ICMP Ping, TCP Connect

I’d like to see native support for ICMP ping and TCP connect.

I’ve seen the workaround at Using the net-ping module to monitor non-HTTP endpoints, but this appears to be a hack on the synthetics HTTP/browser functionality, which is cumbersome for the user and probably overly resource-intensive for the NR synthetics probe.

ICMP ping and TCP connect would allow customers to monitor network devices and non-HTTP services, of which there are many. It’s a high leverage feature - very useful and simple to implement.

It seems that Synthetics was built to be purely HTTP and Browser-based, but the product could really benefit from support for a broader set of core protocols.

New Relic edit

We take feature ideas seriously and our product managers review every one when plotting their roadmaps. However, there is no guarantee this feature will be implemented. This post ensures the idea is put on the table and discussed though. So please vote and share your extra details with our team.

Great post, @pope! Hearing customer use cases is super helpful when passing feature ideas to the product team.

I have added a poll to this thread so please kick off the vote! I will also make sure that your request gets to the right people.

Thanks!

I recently had a request for an ICMP synthetic for which I was unable to find a solution. It would be useful to expand the monitoring capabilities to cover these other types of synthetic test and reduce the number of toolsets.

Awesome, @stefan_garnham! I will update the feature request with your input as well.

Not only do I want this too, I was already under the impression that this functionality existed within the New Relic ecosystem. I’m very disappointed to find that it does not, and that there is a feature you call “ping” that’s not a ping at all, it’s a simple HTTP check. It’s often helpful to know that a web server is available to the internet and just having an application issue, or if both an HTTP and PING check fail, you know the host is having a catastrophic failure. I will say that a far less expensive competitor offers this out of the box. c’mon New Relic!

MattS,

Thanks for this feedback. I think your description of one of the use cases for a true ICMP ping is spot on. We have heard similar feedback from a few other customers as well and this functionality is on our radar as something we want to build into the product. I can’t give a timeline right now as there are a number of other priorities before we would do that work. Nevertheless, please know that your voice is being heard and we will get to this.

+1 here, however I have a greater requirement is for TCP Connect over ICMP ping. While the workaround linked to above does work, it comes at a significant cost vs HTTP ping.

Pretty much everything I look at that’s internet facing or cloud delivered is all https so it’s not perhaps a burning desire for most of my use cases.

However, I can see that adding this kind of check would open up opportunities for more heritage / internal apps if you can deploy private minions. This allows a mop-up activity for a bunch of services that might not have had a previous easy monitoring capability

I was also under the impression that the “PING” monitor allowed literal pings, it is something that we would definitely get a lot of use from. We have systems which have IPs but not web interfaces which we cannot install agents on, so being able to externally verify that their network interfaces are responding is something we really need.