A different question about Network Manager

[Darc Sceptor]

I have spent many years as a developer of applications within a network. So I think of myself as a somewhat knowledgeable person about that subject.
In Linux Mint we have a "Network Manager" which does a fantastic job of telling me "you have a wire stuck in the hole in the back of your computer" (well it is shorter by saying "connected to wired network" but you get the point of my humor)

Now the question: is there an application out there that I can replace Network Manager with that is an all-in-one-place true Network Manager. What I believe it should do is the following:

1) is my interface hot (wired network or wifi network) just to know my hardware hasn't failed.
2) is the internet active (I have yet to find any need to know that the router is hot or not. I usually know it is dead because I'm the one that pressed the power button) but Network Manager doesn't bother to tell me that the internet is hot or not. So, for the moment, I have to peek between my monitors to see if the light on my router is red, yellow, or green.
3) As an option what is the speed of the connection throughput up and down.
4) And finally I think it would be awesome if it could tell me name resolution is active or not responding.

All of this has to do with managing a network and should be a part of that without the need to run the Terminal and run secondary applications to find out the totality of the network. After all, Network Manager is a bold name and this application should live up to that name.

So as an example if the network died during a huge rainstorm (we get some pretty big ones here in the Andes Mountains) I would see

Wired connection Active
Internet not responding
Up: 0 Dn: 0
Name resolution not responding

Is everything up but the route to the DNS servers died at my provider?

Wired connection Active
Internet is active
Up: 0 Dn: 0
Name resolution not responding

And finally I am trying to reach (using a recent example) WhatsApp which is heavily used here in Colombia

Wired connection Active
Internet is Active
Up: 15 Dn: 350
Name resolution is responding

From those three example showing just 4 simple pieces of information when I mouse over my Network Manager I can immediately troubleshoot what the problem is and determine the next route of action to take.

 

[AlphaObeisance]

I'm pretty novice when it comes to networking unfortunately, but I'm wondering if Netdata or Nagios might be something to consider? I don't know much about them but I do know they've got some pretty neat monitoring utilities.

 

[Darc Sceptor]

Netdata is a huge, heavy server monitoring system. Nagios, again, is a heavy server environment monitor. I just want a lightweight thingy that sits on my panel and can also give me a quick way into network management inside my machine.

 

[CaffeineAddict]

@Darc Sceptor
There is no such AIO tool AFAIK, but CLI programs exist to manage different aspects of networking, all of which are manual work.

I don't think measuring NIC temp is possible at all.

 

[JasKinasis]

You could perhaps use a lightweight system monitor like Conky and get it to run a couple of terminal commands/scripts to check and report the status of your connection.
That would typically appear as an overlay on your desktop though. It wouldn’t be a system tray icon, or anything like that.

 

[MikeRocor]

You could perhaps use a lightweight system monitor like Conky and get it to run a couple of terminal commands/scripts to check and report the status of your connection.
That would typically appear as an overlay on your desktop though. It wouldn’t be a system tray icon, or anything like that.

I was able to get conky to run one cycle, displaying some network info in the terminal window, then exit with the following config in /tmp/.conkyrc (which, I'm sure, has -much- room for improvement):

-- Conky, a system monitor https://github.com/brndnmtthws/conky
--
-- This configuration file is Lua code. You can write code in here, and it will
-- execute when Conky loads. You can use it to generate your own advanced
-- configurations.
--
-- Try this (remove the `--`):
--
--   print("Loading Conky config")
--
-- For more on Lua, see:
-- https://www.lua.org/pil/contents.html

conky.config = {
    alignment = 'top_left',
    background = false,
    border_width = 1,
    cpu_avg_samples = 2,
    default_color = 'white',
    default_outline_color = 'white',
    default_shade_color = 'white',
    double_buffer = false,
    draw_borders = false,
    draw_graph_borders = true,
    draw_outline = false,
    draw_shades = false,
    extra_newline = false,
    font = 'DejaVu Sans Mono:size=12',
    gap_x = 60,
    gap_y = 60,
    minimum_height = 5,
    minimum_width = 5,
    net_avg_samples = 2,
    no_buffers = true,
    out_to_console = true,
    out_to_ncurses = false,
    out_to_stderr = false,
    out_to_x = false,
    own_window = true,
    own_window_class = 'Conky',
    own_window_type = 'override',
    show_graph_range = false,
    show_graph_scale = false,
    stippled_borders = 0,
    update_interval = 1.0,
    uppercase = false,
    use_spacer = 'none',
    use_xft = true,
}


conky.text = [[
Networking:
eth0 : ${addr eth0}
  Up:   ${upspeed}
  Down: ${downspeed}
]]

and got the following results:

tc@dolly:~$ conky -i 1 -c /tmp/.conkyrc
Networking:
eth0 : 192.168.1.109
  Up:   0 B
  Down: 0 B
tc@dolly:~$

There are other bits of network info available via conky, but I don't know exactly what - didn't see anything about DNS or temperature.