SHSelfHostIndex

Ping Exporter vs Smokeping Prober

A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted monitoring & status options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.

Not the right match-up?
PI Ping Exporter Prometheus exporter for ICMP ping round-trip metrics VS SM Smokeping Prober Prometheus exporter that probes latency like Smokeping
FeaturePing ExporterSmokeping Prober
Deploy effortUnder-an-hour setupUnder-an-hour setup
Health score80 · Excellent81 · Excellent
CategoryMonitoring & StatusMonitoring & Status
LicenseMITApache-2.0
LanguageGoGo
Setup difficultyEasyEasy
Min. RAM64 MB64 MB
Deploymentdocker, binary, kubernetesdocker, binary, kubernetes
GitHub stars★ 635★ 738
First released20182018
ReplacesPingPlotter, ThousandEyesSmokePing, PingPlotter

What are Ping Exporter and Smokeping Prober?

Ping Exporter

Ping Exporter is a Prometheus exporter that measures network round-trip time, packet loss, and reachability to configured targets using ICMP echo requests. It is a lightweight way to monitor connectivity to hosts and routers from a Prometheus stack.

  • Round-trip and loss metrics
  • Multiple target support
  • IPv4 and IPv6 probing
  • Prometheus scrape endpoint

Smokeping Prober

The Smokeping Prober is a Prometheus exporter that performs ICMP latency measurements to a configured set of targets, exposing histogram metrics for loss and round-trip time. It brings Smokeping-style network latency tracking into the Prometheus ecosystem.

  • ICMP latency histograms
  • Prometheus-native metrics
  • Tiny resource footprint
  • Grafana dashboard friendly

Ping Exporter vs Smokeping Prober: key differences

Both projects are written in Go. Licensing differs — MIT for Ping Exporter versus Apache-2.0 for Smokeping Prober.

Why pick each one

Choose Ping Exporter if…

  • Trivial to deploy
  • Minimal configuration

Watch out for

  • ICMP only
  • No alerting on its own
Ping Exporter details

Choose Smokeping Prober if…

  • Drop-in for Prometheus stacks
  • Very lightweight

Watch out for

  • No built-in UI
  • Requires Grafana for graphs
Smokeping Prober details

Frequently asked questions

Is Ping Exporter or Smokeping Prober better?

Neither is universally better. Smokeping Prober has the larger community; both share a easy setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.

Are Ping Exporter and Smokeping Prober free and open-source?

Yes. Ping Exporter is licensed under MIT and Smokeping Prober under Apache-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.

Can I run Ping Exporter and Smokeping Prober with Docker?

Ping Exporter: yes. Smokeping Prober: yes.