ICMP Ping Monitoring for Your Infrastructure

ICMP ping monitoring sends Internet Control Message Protocol Echo Request packets to a target host and waits for an Echo Reply. It's the simplest and most reliable way to check if a network host is reachable and measure the round-trip latency between your monitoring location and the target.

Yes, ICMP ping monitoring is available on every plan. Free: 10 monitors with 5-minute intervals. Nano ($9/mo): 50 monitors with 2-minute intervals. Pro ($24/mo): 500 monitors with 30-second intervals. Agency ($49/mo): 1,000 monitors with 15-second intervals.

Use ICMP checks for monitoring network infrastructure like routers, switches, firewalls, DNS servers, and bare-metal hosts that don't run HTTP services. For websites, APIs, and web applications, use HTTP or API checks instead, as they validate application-level health rather than just network reachability.

Yes, some firewalls and network configurations block ICMP traffic. If a host blocks ping requests, ICMP checks will report it as down even though the host may be running. In those cases, use TCP or HTTP checks instead. Most infrastructure devices and servers allow ICMP by default.

Each ICMP check records the round-trip time (RTT) in milliseconds, the TTL (Time To Live) value from the ICMP reply, the resolved IP address, and geographic metadata including the target's country, region, city, ASN, and ISP. All metrics are stored in your monitoring history.

When a ping check fails, exit1.dev automatically performs a 30-second re-check. An alert is only triggered after 4 consecutive failures within 5 minutes. This eliminates false positives from transient network blips and ensures you only get notified about real outages.

Absolutely. Combining ICMP ping checks with HTTP or TCP checks gives you full-stack visibility. If your HTTP check fails but the ICMP ping succeeds, you know the host is reachable but the application has an issue. If both fail, it's likely a network or infrastructure problem.

ICMP checks support the same alert channels as all other check types: email (all plans), SMS (Pro and Agency), and webhooks (all plans). Slack, Discord, and Microsoft Teams channels are included on Pro and Agency. Webhooks integrate with PagerDuty, Opsgenie, and any other webhook-enabled platform.