# Frequently Asked Questions about Alarm Pinger

What is Alarm Pinger?

Alarm pinger is a tool for network monitoring. It test periodically reachability of one of more network devices and the quality of their network connections.

Can Alarm Pinger be user to monitor services?

No. The only way Alarm Pinger monitor things is sending ICMP echo-requests and analyzing ICMP echo-replies. So only host reachability is tested.

Can Alarm Pinger use TCP/UDP/anything instead of ICMP for pinging?

No. It just do plain ICMP echo queries.

Why can't I use host names for target names?

Because it would be very hard to interpret results if the host name resolves to more than one IP address.

I don't want any messages mailed to me. How can I turn them off?

Just comment out `mailto` and `mailfrom` lines in `apinger.conf` file.

How can I graph `apinger` measurements?

You will need `rrdtool` installed on the system, where `apinger` is running. Make sure `apinger` will find it. You may pass the path to the `configure` script before `apinger` compilation.

To make `apinger` actually store the measurements, you need to set `rrd interval` global configuration option to some time interval and `rrd file` target configuration option to path of the database which will be written by `apinger`. The database should be writable by user set with `user` option.

To graph the stored measurements you can use rrdcgi script generated by `apinger` with `-g` option followed by path to a directory where the graphs will be stored. Usually you will also need to pass `-l` followed with location of those graphs as seen on the HTTP server.