Ping 1.0.2 - Ability to define CIDR blocks in the agent configuration file

[AlejandroNunez81]

Summary

When deploying the Ping integration, the host configuration currently accepts only single IP addresses. This Feature Request proposes adding support for CIDR block notation (e.g., 10.112.140.0/24), which represents a range of IPs (in this case, 256 addresses from 10.112.140.0 to 10.112.140.255).

Motivation

In many real-world environments, users need to monitor entire subnets rather than individual IPs. Allowing CIDR input would enable the integration to automatically perform a ping sweep across a specified network segment, a capability commonly available in other monitoring tools and network scanners.

Currently, to achieve the same coverage, users must manually list hundreds or even thousands of individual IP addresses, which is both time-consuming and impractical. This limitation makes the integration less scalable for larger network environments.

Proposed Behavior

• Extend the host configuration field to accept CIDR blocks in addition to single IPs.
• The integration should automatically expand the CIDR range into individual IPs and perform pings accordingly.
• Optionally, provide configuration parameters to:
  • Limit the number of IPs expanded from a CIDR block.
  • Control the concurrency or rate of ping operations for performance and safety.

Example

instances:
  - host: 10.112.140.0/24
    timeout: 1
    count: 3

This configuration would result in the integration pinging all 256 addresses in the subnet.

Use Case

This feature is especially useful for:

• Network monitoring in large infrastructures.
• Automatically detecting reachability issues across subnets.
• Reducing configuration overhead in dynamic or frequently changing network environments.

Additional Notes

• This enhancement would bring the Datadog Ping integration in line with industry-standard network monitoring tools.
• Backward compatibility should be maintained — existing configurations using single IPs should continue to function as before.

Note that for Ping for NDM - Auto discovery already has some kind of CIRD support, but it only works for devices that respond to SNMP:

Note: For Autodiscovery, Datadog does not ping devices that do not respond to SNMP.