Regularly testing speed between several Internet machines with decent reporting?
 

Hello, everyone.

The actual task I want to solve is the following:

I have several machines that I use, let's say, two servers in different countries, a laptop and a smartphone. I need to regularly (say, once an hour) test the quality of connection among all 4 of the machines (makes it 12 connections). The number of machines may later increase. After the testing, I need to present the result in a concise and easily accessible form.

At the moment, I'm running a cron job on each machine (except the smartphone), which does a ping, and an iperf3 connection from a bash script, and stores the result in a file in an accessible location. On a "primary node" another cron job fetches those files and merges them into an existing database, which is itself queried by a conky timer on my laptop and is displayed as a conky widget.

This kinda works, but is extremely fragile and unscalable. In particular, each machine requires separate configuration, iperf3 services require error-prone fiddling with authentication, and awk mastery used for merging the reports is hardly reproducible.

Is there some less macgyvered way? Some canned solution? What are the keywords to search for?

Just download a file from a known reliable fast server, and measure the speed?