Ping monitoring

The simplest way to know a host is alive.

A plain ICMP check asks one question: does this machine answer? No ports, no credentials, no assumptions about what runs on it. When the answer changes, your escalation policy runs.

Nothing to install. No agent on the host. Hesklo pings it from the outside, the same way anything else on the network would.
Works on anything that answers. Servers, routers, switches, printers, appliances, a NAS in a cupboard. If it responds to ICMP, it can be monitored.
Round-trip time recorded. Every check stores latency, so you can see a link degrading before it drops entirely.

Start free All features

01 · What it is for

Reachability, and nothing else.

Ping answers a narrower question than an HTTP check, and that is exactly why it is useful. It separates "the machine is gone" from "the application on it is broken".

Servers and VMs

Know a box has dropped off the network before someone opens a ticket about the thing running on it.

Network gear

Routers, switches and firewalls rarely speak HTTP but they all answer ICMP.

Devices without a service

Appliances, NAS boxes and hardware that has no port worth checking still tell you they are alive.

Isolating a fault

Pair a ping monitor with an HTTP monitor on the same host. If ping is up and HTTP is down, the problem is the application, not the machine.

Latency over time

Round-trip time is stored on every check, so a slowly worsening link shows up as a trend rather than a surprise.

Sites without public services

Monitor an office line, a VPN endpoint or anything that just needs to be reachable.

02 · When it fails

The same canvas, the same escalation.

A ping monitor is a monitor like any other. Draw from its down port and the policy runs exactly as it reads.

Confirm before paging

Require several missed replies in a row. Networks drop the occasional packet and that is not an outage.

Tiered escalation

Notify a channel first, wait, then page whoever is on call if the host is still gone.

Automated recovery

An HTTP action step can hit an endpoint that power-cycles or reprovisions the host before a human is involved.

Full incident history

Every outage is recorded with its cause and duration, alongside your other monitors.

Questions

Common questions

What is the difference between ping monitoring and HTTP monitoring?

A ping check asks whether a machine responds on the network at all. An HTTP check asks whether an application on that machine returns a healthy response. Running both against the same host is a fast way to tell a dead server apart from a broken application.

Do I need to install anything on the host?

No. Hesklo pings the host from outside, so there is no agent to deploy and nothing to keep updated. The host only needs to be reachable and to answer ICMP.

What if my firewall blocks ICMP?

Then a ping check will always fail, and a TCP check is the better fit. TCP monitoring opens a connection to a specific port, which tells you a service is accepting connections without relying on ICMP being allowed through.

Does a dropped packet trigger an alert?

Only if you configure it that way. A monitor can require a number of consecutive failures before it counts as down, which is the usual setup for ping given that occasional packet loss is normal.