Whenever you attempt to monitor and troubleshoot your network issues, the first solution that comes to your mind is a ping monitoring solution.
Ping is the easiest and fastest way to test network connectivity between servers or hosts and is the most used utility when you come across a network troubleshooting process.
Internet protocol and the associated components can be managed and monitored using a ping monitoring tool.
It allows users to verify the right connections and check their network availability to ensure whether the system is up or down.
Let’s understand more about ping and its impact, along with the best ping monitoring tools to monitor and troubleshoot your network.
What is a Ping?
A ping is a method that allows to test and identify whether a particular destination IP address can accept the requests in the computer network administration. It is a command-line utility available on every operating system with network connectivity.
Ping acts as a test to see whether a network device is reachable. A good ping successfully gets the response from the computer and further pinged back to the originating computer.
The word “Ping” comes from the sonar terminology, where ping is an audible sound wave that comes out of an object when we apply a force.
What is Ping Monitoring?
Ping Monitoring is the practice of regularly pinging a device or computer to check whether the device responds to the signal. If the device receives a network signal immediately, it will be a good ping. But if the device receives it too late, it will be a bad ping.
This way, you can find the maximum, minimum, and average response times.
The time between sending the network packet and receiving the response is called ping time, which is usually measured in milliseconds (ms). The lower the value of your ping time, the better will be the ping quality. This signifies how fast and healthy your network is.
Furthermore, ping sends an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request to the specific interface on a network. When the target receives the requests, it responds to the message immediately by sending the echo reply packets.
How is Ping Monitoring helpful?
Ping monitoring is useful for online gamers, remote workers, sysadmins, IT professionals, network engineers, hosted services, legal IT services, VoIP services, and more. Let’s dig into its benefits more:
Uptime monitoring and recording
It is not practical to manually keep an eye on the uptime, especially when the network operates across multiple sites. Here, a ping monitoring solution can be used to automatically check the connection and response time on a defined schedule from various sources. This way, you can monitor your uptime, spot issues, and fix them.
Device availability
If you are running a business, you need to ensure all your devices on the network are available all the time for your users. Rather than going site by site to check the availability manually, you can leverage ping monitoring software to check if the device is available or not.
Improved Security
Due to silicon-level security breaches and potential hardware failures, many companies have ended up compromising their data at a physical level.
With a ping monitoring tool, you can increase the security of your server by constantly monitoring the server’s performance and availability, thereby identifying its speed and issues. Slow performance might indicate some issues that you need to address.
Enhanced profits
If you are running an online business, ping monitoring can be useful for you. When your website goes down, it affects your customers’ experience and your revenue. So, every second your site is down, you might lose hundreds of visitors.
But using powerful ping monitoring software, you can ensure your server is always available and fix availability issues. This way, you can offer a seamless user experience, save time, and keep on making more profits.
Now, let’s check out the best ping monitoring tools to understand how they can help your businesses.
Paessler PRTG
Check the availability of all the network devices by using Paessler PRTG’s all-in-one ping monitoring tool. It provides PROMPT, customizable notifications in case of disruptions, and a quick overview of everything in the individualized dashboards.
This network and ping monitoring software run on all the major Windows systems, including Windows 10 and Windows Server 2012 R2. Thus, you will get a robust tool for your entire network. It also keeps an eye on every system in your network so that you won’t face any hassle while managing them.
Experience a built-in and customizable alarm system that notifies all the problems promptly. The ping sensor is used as a master sensor for all the network devices in your organization. If the master sensor fails for any reason, all the sensors on the device will switch to sleep mode.
Check if everything is alright from the PRTG dashboard, which is customizable according to your needs. While you are away from the desk but still want to access it, PRTG gives you the advantage of accessing the server from your smartphone so that you never miss anything.
Setting up PRTG in your network is super easy, thanks to Auto Discovery. Paessler PRTG pings the private IP addresses and creates sensors automatically for your available devices. It offers three sensors for your ping monitoring, including Ping Sensor, Ping Jitter Sensor, and Cloud Ping Sensor.
PRTG provides an easily upgradable transparent license model. You will get a 30-day free trial to check if it meets your needs. After completion of the trial period, your subscription will be automatically reverted to the freeware version, from where you can upgrade to any paid license.
Better Uptime
Better Uptime is a modern monitoring service that combines ping and uptime monitoring, incident management, and status pages into a single, beautifully designed product.
The setup takes 3 minutes. After that, you get a call, email, or Slack alert, whenever your server or website goes down. The main features are:
- Ping, HTTP(s), SSL & TLD expiration, Cron jobs checks
- Unlimited phone call alerts
- Easy on-call scheduling
- Screenshots & error logs of incidents
- Slack, Teams, Heroku, AWS, and 100+ other integrations
EMCO Ping Monitor
Monitor the connection quality and up/down the state of your network devices with EMCO Ping Monitor software. Whenever the connection quality of the host changes, you will get an immediate notification.
For each host, EMCO collects complete statistics, such as outages, latency, uptime, and other monitoring metrics, so that you can analyze the performance of any historical period to generate a real-time report. It uses ICMP pings to detect the statuses of the hosts and estimates connection quality.
EMCO software allows you to find hosts easily with various quality and state characteristics in order to navigate them for detailed data. It supports sound notifications, Windows Tray, and email and provides custom notifications by configuring a script. You will also get powerful built-in tools for reporting and data analysis.
The tool represents the collected information on charts so that you can estimate the performance easily and quickly. EMCO has a specific engine that is optimized to monitor several hosts simultaneously, say 32000 hosts at a time. You can switch between the standard ping latency measurement with a precision of 1ms and high precision ping latency measurement with a precision value of 0.01ms.
Furthermore, get high host availability monitoring, connection quality monitoring, host performance analysis, detailed statistics, flexible notifications, easy customizations, built-in reporting, and more.
EMCO Ping Monitoring software comes in three editions, starting from a freeware edition to the enterprise edition.
SolarWinds Ping Monitor
Monitor your devices’ response times continuously with SolarWinds Ping Monitor. You can choose from the available network devices you want to check their availability. The tool lets you export monitoring data via text files and images and graphs via image files.
SolarWinds’ Ping graph tool provides all the results in the bar, column, ribbon, area, or step charts. Therefore, you will get advanced yet simple ping monitoring software for your network troubleshooting. It continuously monitors routers, workstations, servers, and other network devices to help you diagnose network problems easily.
Get response time in real-time and response rates in the form of graphical charts with the help of a simple ping tool. It sends ICMP packets to the target IP address and measures the response time as well as packet loss. In addition, SolarWinds offers an enhanced ping tool that gives many graphical options to help you visualize and identify the problems in real-time.
Gain the visibility you need with this ping monitor software to solve network connection issues. You will also get 60+ network troubleshooting and management tools. You can access the network diagnostics tools, such as Enhanced Ping, Ping, Ping Sweep, TraceRoute, and DNS Analyzer, from a single unified desktop console to solve more complex issues.
Download a free trial now to find out how all the tools will help you troubleshoot and manage your network.
Dotcom-Monitor
Instantly ping and verify the connection quality of your servers and all the network devices with Dotcom-Monitor. It helps you quickly identify the network-related issues and outages to diagnose the problems in real-time.
Dig deeper into your network data with powerful and dynamic reports by verifying uptime status using ICMP requests. You can ensure the integrity of firewalls, routers, and other network devices. The ping protocol works by sending an ICMP request to an IP address or target name to verify IP-level connectivity.
Dotcom-Monitor provides various tools so that you never miss a single piece of data, such as reports, alerts, filters, private agents, and many more. Also, the XML reporting service is a flexible and simple framework that offers APIs for your monitoring data.
Integrate Dotcom-Monitor with widely used platforms, such as Asana, Zapier, BMC, Salesforce, and more. Get robust enterprise functionalities and features in a cloud-based model and monitor the actual performance from your real browsers through any of the network locations.
Choose a flexible pricing option to find the right configuration. Start your 30-day free trial today and get public dashboards, multi-user support, PDF reports, SSO integration, XML data feed, API, and more.
PingPlotter
Get better internet connections with PingPlotter that helps verify your network strength, diagnose the issues, and work toward a better solution. You will find various tools available depending on the problem you want to solve.
PingPlotter is a troubleshooting tool for all your network devices that plots diagnostics metrics, including traceroute, jitter, and ping, on an infinite timeline. In addition, you can use it to identify the bottlenecks and figure out the source of each problem.
Experience the faster sample rate as PingPlotter pings by the second while others ping by the minute. Measure industry-standard metrics, such as packet loss, jitter, mean opinion score (MOS), and latency. It also helps you discover intermittent patterns to simplify the communication of problems.
Furthermore, get proactive tools to send notifications of the events to other applications with the help of custom alerts. View the diagnostic data with any person with the option of shareable results and test the network easily from the perspective of any device experiencing issues.
Download the free trial today and start monitoring the pings in your network.
Nagios
Take the ping monitoring quality of all your network devices to the next level with Nagios. It provides a wide range of monitoring for pings, including packet loss and reachability. You will enjoy enhanced services, application availability, and faster servers using this effective ping monitoring solution.
Nagios offers Nagios XI and Nagios Core that has ping monitoring capabilities. Nagios XI is the most robust monitoring tool in the market and provides monitoring of all critical devices in your organization. It can also detect protocol failures and network outages quickly.
Nagios XI offers a simple GUI that gives the option of customization of layout, preferences, and design according to the per-user basis. You can also view all the operations and processes easily from powerful dashboards.
On the other hand, Nagios Core offers a powerful monitoring engine that gives you the highest degree of monitoring ping of your network devices. Get advanced user management, configuration wizard, network management, snapshot, and other effective benefits for your troubleshooting work.
Download the free trial today and check how the ping action component and ICMP monitoring plugins work for you.
Spiceworks
If you are facing issues with your network devices, try Spiceworks to get real-time ping monitoring, detect problems, and fix them immediately and easily. This ping monitoring solution helps you detect whether your network device’s connectivities are offline or online.
Spiceworks dashboard is intelligent that automatically sets up your critical network devices on the dashboard for monitoring of the devices in real-time. Also, the connectivity dashboard allows you to keep tabs on routers, printers, Wi-Fi APs, switches, IP-enabled security cameras, servers, and more.
Just add the hostname or IP address to the dashboard from any available monitor in your network in order to access it and monitor the infrastructure. Whenever any of the critical devices in your organization goes down, Spiceworks immediately notifies you with a smart email alert option. You will also get a fully-integrated IT management cloud tools suite with your Spiceworks subscriptions.
Spiceworks comes with a free version.
Pingdom
Track and test the ping status of network devices with Pingdown and get the result instantly. It offers an automated ping monitoring solution and provides an immediate alert if some outage or uptime issues appear.
This advanced ping monitoring tool is best for complex networks of hosts and services to deliver content quickly. It tests website response times and availability using a network spread in more than 100 geographically dispersed locations.
Get accurate page load times and improve visitors’ experiences by pinging across the globe. Detect performance issues instantly, if any, in your main website or CDN data centers. You will also receive a quick alert on your device through email or SMS.
Whenever any problem arises in your network or ping responses fail, you will receive a notification to take quick action. Similarly, whenever your website gets back online, you will again get the notification.
Pingdom records every monitoring ping along with the results of various tests. Its built-in engine helps you identify long-term and short-term performance issues based on their root causes. These ping responses will show how your server responds to the initial connection.
Connect with the entire team with Pingdom’s group messaging applications to know the ping status so that ping issues can be registered and addressed instantly. Monitor the ping now by availing yourself of a free trial.
WhatsUp Gold
Monitor uptimes, network availability, connections statistics, and more with a ping monitoring tool, WhatsUp Gold. It monitors the pings in the network, notifies you about the issues, and reports the changes in your network connectivity.
This software provides ping, enhanced ping, graphical ping, proxy ping, and SNMP ping to check your network health and availability. It also offers a powerful notification and alerting system.
WhatsUp Gold verifies the network connectivity via a roundtrip time taken by ICMP protocol to send data packets to the target host. It uses regular pings to check device outages, downtimes, and device connections automatically.
You will get ping statistics data, such as lost packets, maximum/minimum roundtrip times, average roundtrip times, failed pings, and uptime. WhatsUp Gold also evaluates the status of the connection so that you get notified in time about it.
Download the free trial of WhatsUp Gold to monitor pings.
FAQs
Answer: When choosing the software, you must check what benefit you will get, such as automation, the quality of the tool, alerts and notifications, data privacy, etc. A good ping tool gives you no extra burden of work and easily solves all your network-related problems. Some software offers freeware editions with the same level of benefits.
Answer: Ping monitoring solutions provide information on the system or device level. The device-level information is quite useful when it comes to availability and performance. It saves you time and effort from manual checking of your network connection. So, investing in good software is wise.
Conclusion
IT teams, pro gamers, enterprises, and other professionals must know how their network systems and critical servers work. More importantly, they must be notified when the network connection goes offline.
Ping monitoring tools make this process simple so you can track the performance and availability of every device in your network. It ensures they work fine and help you spot any issues, fix them, and prevent security hazards.
You may also look at some of the best packet loss testing tools.