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Ping Monitoring

Ping monitoring checks whether a host is reachable over ICMP and how quickly it responds. Use it to detect host-level availability issues before application-layer checks are affected.

How Ping Monitoring Works

Each check sends an ICMP echo request to your target host and records whether it receives a reply within the configured timeout.

Ping monitoring is useful for quickly identifying:

  • Host unreachable events
  • Network path issues
  • Sudden increases in response time

Limits

Ping monitoring follows the same limits as other monitor types.

Configuration Options

1) Target Host / IP

Set the destination your monitor should ping.

  • Domain name (for example: example.com)
  • IPv4 address (for example: 1.1.1.1)
  • IPv6 address (if supported by your environment)

Use a stable hostname or IP that represents the service endpoint you care about.

2) Check Interval

Choose how often UptimeObserver sends a ping check.

  • Shorter intervals detect outages faster
  • Longer intervals reduce monitoring traffic

Use the same interval strategy you apply to other monitor types.

3) Timeout

Define how long to wait for a ping reply before marking the check as failed.

  • Lower timeout: faster failure detection, more sensitive to transient latency
  • Higher timeout: fewer false positives during brief network jitter

Common Use Cases

  • Verify that critical hosts are reachable from monitoring regions
  • Detect infrastructure or routing issues before HTTP failures occur
  • Track baseline host responsiveness over time

Troubleshooting

Frequent Timeouts

  • Confirm the target host is online
  • Check firewall rules and ICMP policies on the host/network
  • Increase timeout slightly if your network has variable latency

Intermittent Failures

  • Test from multiple networks to isolate routing issues
  • Verify no upstream filtering drops ICMP packets
  • Correlate incidents with provider/network maintenance windows

Host Resolves but Does Not Reply

DNS resolution can succeed while ICMP traffic is blocked. If this is expected, use an HTTP or Port monitor for service-level validation.

Need Help?

If you need help tuning Ping monitoring for your infrastructure, contact support and include:

  • Target host/IP
  • Current interval and timeout settings
  • Timestamp of recent failed checks

This helps us diagnose issues faster.