Visualize Network Ping with gping: Install and Use Guide

When testing network connectivity, the traditional ping command is common, but the article introduces gping, a Rust‑written command‑line tool that provides a dynamic graphical display of ping results.

Installation

Download the binary package that matches the operating system. For CentOS 7 the steps are:

[root@centos7 ~]# wget https://github.com/orf/gping/releases/download/gping-v1.2.6/gping-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz
[root@centos7 ~]# ll gping-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 889865 Dec 7 22:20 gping-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz
[root@centos7 ~]# mkdir /usr/local/gping
[root@centos7 ~]# tar zxf gping-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz -C /usr/local/gping

If the program fails with the error

./gping: /lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.18' not found (required by ./gping)

the article provides a fix by building and installing glibc 2.18:

curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/glibc/glibc-2.18.tar.gz
tar zxf glibc-2.18.tar.gz
cd glibc-2.18/
mkdir build
cd build/
../configure --prefix=/usr
make -j2
make install

Usage

Running ./gping --help displays the help text, which includes flags such as --cmd to graph command execution time, -4 / -6 for IPv4/IPv6, -s for simple graphics, and options like -b <buffer> to set the display interval. The tool accepts multiple hosts or commands, enabling simultaneous monitoring of several targets.

Overall, gping offers a visual alternative to traditional ping, useful for quickly spotting latency spikes across multiple endpoints.