Hope you guys are aware about PING. If don’t know worries
I will explain to you with easiest technical definition.
A ping is a signal
sent to a particular host that
requests a response. It serves below two main purposes:
1) To check if the
host is available and
2) To measure how
long the response takes.
A
ping request can be performed using a ping command,
which is a standard command in most command line interfaces.
Several network utilities
provide a ping feature, which allows you to ping a server by simply
entering the IP address or domain name. Most ping
programs send multiple pings and provide and average of the pings at the end.
Ping is a computer network administration
software utility used to test the reachability of a host on an Internet
Protocol network. It is available for virtually all operating systems that have
networking capability, including most embedded network administration software.
PING
In terms of technical language Ping
is an ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) echo message, ICMP is a protocol
that routers or other networking devices use to send error messages to each
other, the user send an Echo request with an IP address or a web address, e.g. ping www.instagram.com
Once
the server receives the Echo request it responds with an Echo reply message and
the user device shows the Round Trip Time with some other information like
max/min/avg RTT, number of packets sent and received and packet drops.
Let us come back to our main
topic that should we use Ping or not? If you want to check your network health
then you have at least four options:
1: Put active network probes on suitable
points: Network Probes are active equipment that sits within your network and
real network live traffic is passed through them, these probes generates a lot
of data for you and you can check your network health of many levels, like for
different services, different geographical areas, chronologically they can show
a very big trend if you have a large data storage.
There
are below drawbacks:
- These probes cost a lot.
- You need experienced people to analyze and correlate this data with other network performance KPIs.
2: You can enable the active management
of the networking devices. The devices may exchange a lot of messages with each
other, if enabled, and based on these messages some tools can be used to
extract information like network utilization, delay, etc.
The
drawback in this solution is that it is not very diverse, there are very few
number of parameters that can be enabled, also you are dependent on the vendor
of the actual device as it may or may not be possible to see all parameters on
the third party tool that you choose to use, also sometimes it is not easy to
handshake the device with the third party tool and with the introduction of
each new device or its interface you have to engage the third party tool’s
vendor to add it to your currently monitored network.
3: Use speed tests. Speed tests
are good to have some good information about your network health, its use is
free and it gives you a swift response about your network. Some speed tests, if
they are being used extensively by other users of your network as well, can
tell more detailed information about your network and can benchmark it against
other networks as well, either locally or globally.
4: Hence our last option is to use Ping.
Using ping is free, you can use it to check whatever web server you want to
check, you can use it between network devices to know the RTT between two
routers within your network or outside of your network, its use us simple and
it is always available, do not need internet connection like speed tests.
The
drawback of Ping is that it tells the RTT only, it does not tell you about any
other network performance parameters. Your network may not be giving a good
Quality of Service to Ping so if the network is congested then Ping packets may
be dropped.
However
Ping are the reason of network’s success, it can only tell latency and this is
what we need it to use for, also it tells you’re surely if you have connectivity
with the Pinging of the devices or not. The network may be drop somewhere its
packets due to congestion which means that you can know one more thing about
the network health, while you get some ping packets are being dropped it means
that some part of your actual traffic should also be dropping so it an issue in
your network so you should fixed that ASAP.