When you are having network problems, then the ping command comes really handy. All operating systems come with one or other variations of the ping command including Windows, Linux, MacOS and even some Android variations with BusyBox. In Windows, the ping command, like all the other commands, do not show colored results and therefore you have to read carefully to see the outcome of ping command. If you want to have color coded results so that you can tell just by seeing the colors that ping has succeeded or failed, then you can use an open-source tool PowerPing.
PowerPing is a command line tool that can ping computers using both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. It displays color coded output – red for failure and green for success. Using this command you can check whether your computer can reach a computer, a network or the internet. Most frequently this command is used to check your connectivity to the internet and whether your networking setup is losing data packets when trying to reach the destination.
PowerPing offers a large number of options compared to the Microsoft ping command. Unfortunately, the command line parameters for PowerPing are different to those of Microsoft ping command, making it impossible to replace ping with PowerPing in batch scripts. But since it is an open-source tool, you can modify the program yourself if needed.
In addition to the very basic pinging using the ICMP protocol, it also offers ICMP packet customization, scanning (checking a large number of IP addresses if they respond), flooding (sending ICMP request without waiting for reply), ICMP packet capture, IP location lookup, WHOIS lookup and basic graphing. The developer also promises to add many more new features to PowerPing in the future such as tracerouting, tunneling and ICMP over IPv6.
You can download PowerPing from https://github.com/Killeroo/PowerPing/releases.