September 6, 2020

Monitoring my Internet Connection with Speedtest-cli

I wanted to log my internet’s upload and download speeds over time. brew search speed turned up speedtest-cli which uses speedtest.net servers to measure what I was interested in.

Unfortunately it’s a one time test and if you want it to repeat, you’ll need to automate it. I chose a simple shell while loop to handle this for me¹:

while; do
  speedtest-cli --json --server $(
    speedtest-cli --list |
    grep -E "CenturyLink|Sprint|Enid|OneNet|Cox|Suddenlink" |
    head -20 |
    cut -f 1 -d ')' |
    sort -R | head -1
  ) | tee -a speedtest-log.json
  sleep 600
  clear
done

This checks a random nearby server every 10 minutes.

The $(...) subshell is what finds a random server (speedtest-cli outputs in order of distance). The grep limits it to internet providers I’ve heard of². tee outputs to stdout as well as a log file so I can see the results without having to tail the json log.

I run this in a tmux session dedicated to monitoring my internet (I run 2ping, mtr, and httping here as well).

The results are append to the log as one test run per line so it’s a little terse to read. I may end up writing a Sinatra app to display the results in a more human readable format.

I don’t recommend running this on a laptop as you may forget about it when you tether to your phone’s data plan.↩
Feel free to adjust this to your preference.↩

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Monitoring my Internet Connection with Speedtest-cli

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