I still remember those times when I was a network administrator and we had a terrible connection. The users used to come to me and ask what was going on that they could not access the Internet: was it a problem with the LAN or had we lost connection with the outside world? Then, there was this command called “ping” to clear all our doubts.
Ping is a diagnostic utility for computer networks that checks the state of the connection between the local host and one or several remote computers by sending ICMP packages. This command helps diagnose the state, speed and quality of a given network. At that time, I wished I had had an application that helped me interpret the meaning of those numbers referring to the time a given package took to get to the remote IP and return. But now there is Visual Ping, a piece of software intended to graphically show the state of a network.
The program interface is extremely easy to use and consists of a single window. First, although not necessary, you may want to adjust some parameters, like host (the remote machine IP or alias), packet size, pause and loops (number of times you wish to run the command). After that, you can start the pinging process by pressing the Start button. The pinging results will start visualizing in a panel. But there is nothing different here from what you normally get at the command prompt, the real difference comes from a graph visually showing the results. This is extremely useful because it will give you a visual idea of the process. Just below the results panel, you will find information about the whole process, summarizing the number of sent, received and lost packages as well as the average reply time.
The software offers additional advantages. For example, you may run it from the command prompt or you can create a Windows shortcut to ping specifically one of the hosts that you check very often.
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