ICMP tests allow you to easily monitor the availability of your hosts and diagnose network communication issues. By asserting on the values received from one or more ICMP pings to your endpoint, Datadog can help detect connectivity issues, above-quota latency for round trip times, and unexpected changes in security firewall configuration. The tests can also track the number of network hops (TTL) required to connect to your host and view traceroute results to discover details on each network hop along the path.
ICMP tests can run from both managed and private locations depending on whether you want to trigger ICMP pings to your endpoints from outside or inside your network. You can run ICMP tests on a defined schedule, on demand, or from within your CI/CD pipelines.
After choosing to create an ICMP test, define your test’s request.
env Tags as well as any other tags to your ICMP test. You can then use these tags to quickly filter through your Synthetic tests on the Synthetic Monitoring homepage.Click Test URL to try out the request configuration. A response preview is displayed on the right side of your screen.
ICMP tests can run:
Assertions define what an expected test result is. When hitting Test URL, basic assertions on latency, packet loss, and packet received are added. You must define at least one assertion for your test to monitor.
| Type | Aggregation | Operator | Value Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| latency | avg, max, min or stddev (aka jitter) | is less than, is less than or equal,is, is more than, is more than or equal | integer (ms) |
| packet loss | - | is less than, is less than or equal, is, is more than, is more than or equal | percentage (%) |
| packet received | - | is less than, is less than or equal, is, is more than, is more than or equal | integer |
| network hops | - | is less than, is less than or equal, is, is more than, is more than or equal | integer |
You can create up to 20 assertions per API test by selecting New Assertion or by selecting the response preview directly:
You can set alert conditions to determine the circumstances under which a test should fail and trigger an alert.
When you set the alert conditions to: An alert is triggered if any assertion fails for X minutes from any n of N locations, an alert is triggered only if these two conditions are true:
Your test can trigger retries in case of a failed test result. By default, the retries are performed 300 ms after the first failed test result. The retry interval can be configured with the API.
Location uptime is computed on a per-evaluation basis (whether the last test result before evaluation was up or down). The total uptime is computed based on the configured alert conditions. Notifications sent are based on the total uptime.
Your test sends a notification based on the alerting conditions previously defined. Use this section to define what messages to send to your teams and how to send them.
Similar to monitors, select users and/or services that should receive notifications either by adding a @notification to the message or by searching for team members and connected integrations with the drop-down box.
Enter the notification message for your test. This field allows standard Markdown formatting and supports the following conditional variables:
| Conditional Variable | Description |
|---|---|
{{#is_alert}} | Show when the test alerts. |
{{^is_alert}} | Show unless the test alerts. |
{{#is_recovery}} | Show when the test recovers from alert. |
{{^is_recovery}} | Show unless the test recovers from alert. |
Specify how often you want your test to resend the notification message in the case of test failure. To prevent renotifications from failing tests, leave the option as Never renotify if the monitor has not been resolved.
Email notifications include the message defined in this section as well as a summary of failed assertions. Notifications example:
Click Save to save your test and have Datadog start executing it.
You can create local variables by clicking on Create Local Variable at the top right hand corner of your test configuration form. You can define their values from one of the below available builtins:
{{ numeric(n) }}n digits.{{ alphabetic(n) }}n letters.{{ alphanumeric(n) }}n characters.{{ date(n, format) }}n days.{{ timestamp(n, unit) }}n chosen units.You can use the global variables defined in the Settings and the locally defined variables in the URL and assertions of your ICMP tests.
To display your list of variables, type {{ in your desired field:
A test is considered FAILED if it does not satisfy one or several assertions or if the request prematurely failed. In some cases, the test can fail without being able to test the assertions against the endpoint. These reasons include:
DNSBy default, only users with the Datadog Admin and Datadog Standard roles can create, edit, and delete Synthetic ICMP tests. To get create, edit, and delete access to Synthetic ICMP tests, upgrade your user to one of those two default roles.
If you have access to the custom role feature, add your user to any custom role that includes synthetics_read and synthetics_write permissions.
Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:
