Use of UDP Echo instead of ICMP Echo #18
Description
Because we ran into network errors, that were not showing up in ICMP tests in some scenarions with Equal Cost Multipath, Portchannels/Aggregate Ethernet Channels, Virtual Chassis Fabrics and hardware based forwarding on network devices, we're also doing some regular probes against some echo servers in our network. I think it's not showing up with ICMP probably would have something to do with the hashing and/or queuing behavior on these devices and probably simply the large number of available paths.
The source addresses used for the UDP echo monitoring traffic are spoofing protected to avoid the abuseability for DoS. But since TCP with it's retransmission behavior isn't really compareable to ICMP Pings, UDP echo was the only comparable thing for this purpose.
The echo services are currently probed by distributed smokeping instances using echoping.
Now some colleagues thought about using the fping-exporter instead of the distributed smokeping. But the fping-exporter of course only supports the probing via ICMP echo at the moment. Would it be thinkable to support probing against UDP echo (with a randomized source port) also?