Monitoring Remote Network Health: Building a Lightweight Connectivity Tool with Bash and Docker

Have you ever needed to verify if your remote servers have outbound internet access? Whether you're managing a cluster of web servers or a set of edge devices, ensuring they can "talk to the world" is a fundamental task. In this post, I'll walk you through a lightweight Network Connectivity Monitoring Tool I built using Bash. It's simple, portable, and comes with a Docker-based test environment to get you started safely. The Problem Manually SSH-ing into dozens of servers to run a ping command is tedious and error-prone. I needed a way to: Check connectivity from multiple servers at once. Support non-standard SSH ports. Log results for historical tracking. Get a quick summary of which hosts are "Reachable" vs "Unreachable." The Solution: A Bash-Powered Monitor The core of this tool is a Bash script that uses SSH to execute a ping command on remote targets. Here's a look at the key features and how it works. 1. Robust Scripting with set -euo pipefail To make the script reliable, I used