Ping Monitor
There are 101 ways to monitor your network but few are as integral to the longevity of your network as ping monitoring tools. The overall breakdown of statistical data is fairly sparse however, marking responsive hosts as OK, with a basic date, time and ping shown next to it. More than sufficient in many cases, but a rather basic approach when compared to the other options available.
Essentially, a Twinge flood is the same as a Ping flood and the solutions to protect a network from it are the same as for the main category of DDoS attack via ICMP: turn off ICMP, install a web application firewall or a stateful firewall, or install an intrusion detection system.
The program can also assess the host performance for any historical period using ping results for this period to calculate the host uptime percentage, packet loss, average latency, latency deviation, latency coefficient of variation (CV) and mean opinion score (MOS).
Administrators fill out these templates with the appropriate device or service information, name them for the service in question, and then add them to the monitor's database The fewer clicks we make and fields we need to fill out, the better as far as our testing results.
While this tends to be a less important issue in agent-based systems, since you're going to have to install software on each monitoring target pinging email addresses anyway; for agentless systems, it needs to be as painless as possible because it's a big part of the overall installation process.
Knowing that critical systems and services are working is a fundamental aspect of the network administrator's job, and Ping Monitoring is the most powerful tool for doing so. The sheer simplicity of the command is rather profound, especially considering the amount of information can be garnered from it.
The response to an echo request is immediate and so if the program that sends the request takes a timestamp the moment that the echo request is sent, and another the moment the response arrives, the system can calculate how long a packet takes to get to the target and back.
