Ping Monitoring

Ping monitoring answers a simpler question than uptime: is this host reachable on the network at all? It uses ICMP echo, so it works for routers, load balancers, game servers, database hosts, and anything that responds to a ping but doesn't serve HTTP.

How it works

On each run the checker sends ICMP echo request packets ("pings") to the target host and waits for echo replies. It measures:

• Reachability — did the host reply at all?
• Round-trip time (RTT) — how long each reply took, in milliseconds.
• Packet loss — the fraction of packets that went unanswered.

Pings are sent from US-East and additional regions, and an outage is confirmed by regional consensus so a single flaky network path doesn't false-alarm. Intervals range from every 30 seconds up to hourly.

What triggers an alert

• The host is unreachable — no replies received within the timeout.
• Packet loss exceeds your configured threshold (partial loss often signals a saturated link or failing hardware).
• RTT crosses a latency warning threshold, raising a warning rather than a hard down.

An incident resolves automatically once replies return cleanly across regions.

Setting it up

1. Add monitor and choose Ping.
2. Enter the hostname or IP address (e.g. db.internal.example.com or 203.0.113.10).
3. Set the check interval and select regions.
4. Configure thresholds: acceptable packet loss % (config packetLossThresholdPercent) and an optional RTT warning (latencyThresholdMs). The check sends pingCount packets (default 3) so partial loss is measurable; either threshold being crossed reports degraded.
5. Attach notifications.

Ping only proves the host is up on the network — it does not verify that a service on it is accepting connections. To confirm a specific service, pair it with a TCP Port or Uptime check.

Related

• Uptime · TCP Port · Performance
• Notifications
• Marketing: Ping monitoring feature