What Is ICMP The Internet Control Message Protocol Explained

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.

A DNS resolution function shows the hostname for a requested IP address if it can find it. The absence of a hostname for a record should raise alarms if that IP address was contactable because either your DNS records are out of date or you have an intruder on the network.

Administrators fill out these templates with the appropriate device or service information, name them for the service in question, and then add them to the monitor's database The fewer clicks we make and fields we need to fill out, the better as far as our testing results.

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 pinging email addresses 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.

The response to an echo request is immediate and so if the program that sends the request takes a timestamp the moment that the echo request is sent, and another the moment the response arrives, the system can calculate how long a packet takes to get to the target and back.