Comparitech

There are 101 ways to monitor your network but few are as integral to the longevity of your network as ping monitoring tools. The overall breakdown of statistical data is fairly sparse however, marking responsive hosts as OK, with a basic date, time and ping shown next to it. More than sufficient in many cases, but a rather basic approach when compared to the other options available.

When a router ricochet's back an ICMP packet to report an error, it recreates all of the fields in the original IP header of the packet that it is reporting on. So, an error collection program on the original sending computer could analyze the header and work out exactly which of the IP packets that it sent out failed.

The program can also assess the host performance for any historical period using ping results for this period to calculate the host uptime percentage, packet loss, average latency, latency deviation, latency coefficient of variation (CV) and mean opinion score (MOS).

A ping involves a packet of data being sent to a specific IP address (known as an echo request), if the device is active and healthy it will respond (known as an echo reply) and likely provide additional information that might help diagnose any network issues.

While this tends to be a less important issue in agent-based systems, since you're going to have to install software on each monitoring target what is ping monitoring anyway; for agentless systems, it needs to be as painless as possible because it's a big part of the overall installation process.

Knowing that critical systems and services are working is a fundamental aspect of the network administrator's job, and Ping Monitoring is the most powerful tool for doing so. The sheer simplicity of the command is rather profound, especially considering the amount of information can be garnered from it.

Using this technique gives you a clear perspective of the health of your key devices.PagerDuty's platform for real-time operations allows you to integrate your ping monitoring tools from all different areas of your tech stack and centralize them into one single point of ingestion, enabling full visibility into the health of your network, servers, and other pieces of infrastructure.