Network monitoring script in Bash Scripting - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Network monitoring script

📖 Scenario: You are a system administrator who wants to keep an eye on the network status of a server. You will write a simple Bash script that checks if the server is reachable by pinging it and then reports the result.

🎯 Goal: Build a Bash script that pings a specific IP address or hostname, counts the number of successful responses, and then prints a summary message.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a variable called target with the IP address or hostname to ping

Create a variable called count to specify how many ping attempts to make

Use the ping command with the -c option to send the specified number of pings to the target

Extract the number of successful ping replies from the ping command output

Print a message showing how many pings succeeded out of the total attempts

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Network administrators often need to monitor if servers or devices are reachable to ensure network health.

💼 Career

Knowing how to write simple network monitoring scripts helps in automating routine checks and troubleshooting connectivity issues.

1

Set the target server to ping

Create a variable called target and set it to the IP address 8.8.8.8.

Bash Scripting

# Create a variable called target and set it to 8.8.8.8
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use target=8.8.8.8 to assign the IP address to the variable.

2

Set the number of ping attempts

Create a variable called count and set it to 4 to specify the number of ping attempts.

Bash Scripting

target=8.8.8.8
# Create a variable called count and set it to 4
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use count=4 to set the number of pings.

3

Ping the target and count successful replies

Use the ping command with -c $count to ping $target. Then use grep and wc -l to count how many lines contain the word bytes from and save this number in a variable called success.

Bash Scripting

target=8.8.8.8
count=4
# Ping the target and count successful replies
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use command substitution with $(...) to capture the count of successful replies.

4

Print the ping summary

Print a message that says: "Pinged $target $count times: $success successful replies."

Bash Scripting

target=8.8.8.8
count=4
success=$(ping -c $count $target | grep 'bytes from' | wc -l)
# Print the ping summary message
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use echo with double quotes to include variables in the message.