My parents mobile broadband connection in their summer house seemed a little flaky and my father asked me how we could monitor it. Easy I thought. I would simply grab a Raspberry pi and one of the available tools so I googled and found a nice tutorial. Getting it to work was easy enough but after having this run for a few days the results were weird and didn’t match what we saw while there. So what do any self-respecting programmer do? Write his/her own of course… 🙂
So I broke out my language of choice (Java) and wrote a simple servlet I could use using curl. The servlet responds to GET and POST requests and hence allows me to measure download and upload speed. Using curl it was very easy to capture the connection time and the actual time to do the operation. Putting it all together using cron allowed me to run it on schedule and pipe the result to CSV files for later analysis.
Now I needed a place to run the app – the obvious choice was a free dyno on Heroku. To deploy I simply created an app, set two configuration parameters and then pushed using Git which in turn built, deployed and ran the application. So easy. And all using command line.
Next steps? Send the results to a Google spreadsheet using IFTTT to allow my dad to get the data himself and analyse to his hearts content…
The application is available at github.com/lekkimworld/speedtest and the README explains the whole heroku deployment process.
lekkimworld.com 