Monitoring Techniques

PingTool originally started with ICMP Pings as the only monitoring technique. Over time we have added several other means (described below) by which your hosts can be monitored. Ideas and suggestions about new features that you would like to see on PingTool are always welcome at our forum.

ICMP Pings

The simplest way of testing weather a host is online. With this technique our server sends and ICMP Ping message to the host and waits for a response. If no response is received within allotted time, the host is marked as offline and notifications are sent.

Open Port Monitoring

This method is used to monitor that a host is accepting connection on a specific port. For example if you have an FTP service running on port 21, it should be accepting connections on port 21. If such connection times out or is rejected there might be something wrong with FTP service on the host. In this case although the host itself might still be online you would want to be informed that connections on port 21 are failing. This is exactly how Open Port Monitoring technique operates.

Web Discovery

This monitoring style is much more complex than the previous 2 and has some advanced configuration options. As the name suggest it is used to monitor for website's online presence. A connection is established to a host on either port 80 or 443 and the web content of a specified page is retrieved. First the HTTP status is checked to be 200 OK, any other status is considered as failure. Second, there is an option to search for a specific text in the retrieved content. If text option is selected and the text is not found, it is considered as a failure and notifications are sent.

The ultimate usage of Web Discovery would be to make sure your web server is not experiencing errors. For example if your home page starts returning status 500 Server Error, you might want to know about it before your customers do.