If you want to see how fast a web server or any other kind of responds, you can use the good old PING command. Using the ping command is very easy irrespective of the operating systems. This command is available on all the desktop platforms like Windows, Linux, macOS. In the case of Linux, you may get a few extra options when using the ping command but the basic usage is universal all across the various platforms.
For example, if you want to ping yahoo.com, you can give the command ping yahoo.com. Similarly we can use this command to ping an IP address as well, e.g., ping 192.168.1.1. On a Windows PC, the ping command issued with the -t parameter keeps pinging the host infinitely. On a Linux PC, you do not have to use any such parameters for continuous pinging.
You can use an open-source tool called Ping Monster if you often have to ping a number of domains, IP addresses or hosts. In this tool, we can add all the domains that we want to ping along with their descriptions. You can also add the number of seconds after which the list of domains is to be pinged again.
During the pinging process if Ping Monster encounters an error (such as Destination host unreachable or Request timed out), you can choose what it should do. You can make it write the errors to log, play a music file, send an email message or open a URL with GET parameters which is accessed using the HTTP protocol.
Ping Monster is a very useful tool if you want to keep checking some domains or remote hosts. Whenever an error occurs, you get an alert and this is when you can take an action about the unresponsive server.
You can download Ping Monster from https://sourceforge.net/projects/ping-monster/.