There are times when you have to check if your network or a specific site is responding correctly or is it down. Generally, we do this via the command prompt using the Ping command. The Ping test lets us know if our network is responding or we are getting a “Request Timed Out” or any other Error Message. Thus we can check both the latency of our own internet connection or check if a specific website is down or not.
If you prefer a visual representation of the network response and like to keep log of network activity for a specific time period, MetaPing is the perfect tool for you. MetaPing is a FREE Visual Ping Monitor that makes it quick and easy to keep an eye on the health of our network.
MetaPing – Ping Monitor Usage:
MetaPing a nifty little utility (about 700Kb), that lets us visualize the network activity and lets us see what exactly is happening on our network. You can also use it to check if a website is down or not. Since it lets us store the uptime data, we can monitor how a website or a web-host behaves during a specific time period.
Host grouping for quick problem analysis:
MetaPing lets you create groups of Hosts – For eg, I have created a Group of Google, Yahoo and Bing as “Web Standard” in ping Response time. I can easily compare them with TechNorms.com to check how my web server is responding when compared to them.
This helps us understand how well our server is performing. When this test was performed, compared to Google all other server responses were slow, followed by Bing, Yahoo. TechNorms’s response time was in the same league as Yahoo, which tells me my web-host is doing a good job.
You can see in the chart below, Google’s response time never crossed 100ms, whereas Bing hovers between 200 to 300 ms. Yahoo and this blog’s response time is almost the same, hovering at about 300ms.
MetaPing – Visual Ping Monitor Features:
- Easy to read status for each host.
- Host grouping for quick problem analysis.
- Shows the Uptime for each host.
- Runs on NT4, 2000, XP, Vista, Win 7, 32bit and 64bit.
Conclusion:
MetaPing is a useful network monitoring utility keep a record of earlier activity. Since it’s very small it consumes minimal resources on your computer and can easily keep running in the background without affecting the computers performance.
