Ping monitoring

How the check works

A ping monitor sends one ICMP echo request to the host and waits for the reply. The check passes when the reply arrives within the timeout and the round trip is recorded as the response time, so the strip shows a link getting worse before it drops. It fails when no reply comes back. Some hosts and networks drop ICMP on purpose; for those a TCP port or HTTP monitor answers the same question.

Ping is the right check for a router, a VPN endpoint, a server that runs no public service, or a link between two sites where you want to see latency over the day. It says nothing about whether the application on the host is working; a host answers pings while its web server is stuck. Put both monitors on the page and the strips tell you which layer failed.

When it counts as down

A ping monitor counts as down after two failed checks in a row and as back after one success. Before a failure counts, it is checked again in the same region; only a failure both checks see goes on the record. On Hobby and Pro every other region checks at the same moment, so the page can say down from North America instead of down. A single failed check still appears on the strip with its time and reason, it just does not change the state or send an alert.

Alerts

Each change of state sends one alert: down, and back, with how long it was out. Email is on every plan. Hobby and Pro add Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Pushover, ntfy and a signed webhook, plus a repeat notice every so many minutes while an outage lasts. Nothing is sent during a maintenance window.

What the status page shows

Every ping monitor gets a strip on the public page. Each bar is one check, its height the response time; amber marks a timeout and red any other failure. Consecutive failures are grouped into one entry with the time and the reason, and the mark stays there for the whole range. A ping monitor going down opens an incident on the page by itself and resolves it on recovery.