All operating systems come with a little ping command that can be invoked from the respective consoles. For example, on a Windows PC we can launch the command-prompt (cmd.exe) and then use the ping command from there. Similarly, on a Mac or Linux computer, we have to use ping through terminal. But using this method, we can ping only one network address or domain name at a single time. What if we want to ping multiple domains or network addresses simultaneously?
For pinging many network addresses at the same time, we can use vmPing (Visual Multi Ping). It is an open-source tool that works only on Windows. It requires .NET framework version 4.5 or later to be installed. It can be considered portable as has no other requirements and needs no installation.
In the vmPing window, we can add many child-windows, each allowing us to ping one network address. We can as many child-windows as we want. We can add network addresses to all of these and then ping them one by one or use the F5 key to start pinging them all at once. It accepts all the common network hosts such as domain names, IP addresses and aliases.
What makes vmPing different from the cmd.exe ping command is that the latter stops after 4 attempts while vmPing keeps pinging until stopped. It is more like the ping command of a Linux computer. But there are no options to be provided in the vmPing unlike in the ping command.
When pinging a network address is successful, the screen is shown in the green color. When it fails to ping, the screen is turned crimson red. If you have minimized vmPing without stopping the ping, it will display popup notifications when a target host is up or down in the system tray.
In the options for vmPing, we can enable email alerts and audio alerts. The email alerts are useful if you want to receive an email message when ping fails for a certain host. Similarly, it can make an audible alert on your computer when ping succeeds or fails.
vmPing is a brilliant tool for network administrators who want to diagnose problems with their networks. It also comes with a Traceroute tool of its own.
You can download vmPing from https://github.com/R-Smith/vmPing.