PRTG Is a PING Tester

A PING tester is an essential tool for uptime monitoring. It is used to find out whether your computer can communicate with another computer over the network, and, if a network communication is established, the PING test also measures the response time of your network connection.

How Does the PING Tester Work?

With its PING sensor, PRTG Network Monitor is a full-fledged PING tester: To test the availability of a network device, the PRTG PING tester sends an ICMP packet to the ECHO REPLY port of a server and waits for a result. Only if the returned packet still has the same data content the sensor's result is ok.

There are many possible reasons why a PING test may fail and the PING tester will show a negative result: connection problems (line or router failures), routing problems, or simply because a firewall between the server and the monitoring machine has rejected the packet because PINGs are not allowed by the firewall's rules. Note: When monitoring a remote server a small amount of lost PINGs (1-2%) should usually not be considered harmful.

The PRTG PING tester offers the possibility to create a custom sensor for multiple PING tests, which for the aforementioned reasons is a much more reliable means of uptime monitoring than a simple PING test.

PRTG Network Monitor

PRTG is a complete network monitoring solution. Apart from uptime monitoring, its functionality includes bandwidth monitoring, website availability and server performance monitoring.

Technoligies used are SNMP monitoring (the most common and basic form of network monitoring using the network management protocol SNMP), packet sniffing and NetFlow monitoring. The PRTG network management tools are available in two editions. For basic, free lan traffic monitor and availability monitoring functionality, the Freeware Edition may be downloaded and used for personal and commercial use completely free of charge. For more advanced needs licenses for the Commercial Editions start at $380 / 250 €.