Two cool utilities that extend the usefulness of ping

Last week we discussed the how's and why's of that most basic of TCP/IP diagnostic tools - the Packet Internet Groper, or ping - and delved into a couple of the more arcane aspects of the protocol.

As a child, Gearhead typically got comments such as "shares well" on his report card. In keeping with that accolade, this week we have some ping utility software for Windows to share with you. These products improve greatly upon the raw presentation of the common command line versions.

The first product is a simple Windows ping utility from Infix Technologies, called PingGraph (www.xmission.com/~infix).

The product takes a minimalist approach to presenting ping data, but it works very well, and for $29, it's a good deal.

PingGraph displays a simple, resizable window containing a graph of ping samples. The samples, which can be taken at rates up to 10 per second, are plotted sequentially with the oldest sample on the left.

You can set a threshold ping time and associate a sound with it so you can be alerted when the ping time changes. (The threshold is plotted on the graph, as well.)

For a warning sound, Gearhead recorded himself and fed it through SoundForge, a nice sound editor from Sonic Foundry, the creators of the amazing Acid music composer.

Now when my ISP gets sluggish, I am warned with a booming, godlike voice: "PacBell is on strike again."

PingGraph can also log ping times in a file. That information can be used to track network behavior, and it can come in handy for beating up your ISP. One of the minor problems is that you can't specify the packet size.

A rather more ambitious and complex ping utility is Ping Plotter by Pete Ness. It has an even lower price than PingGraph: $15 per copy. You can find the product at www.nessoft.com/pingplotter.

Ping Plotter draws two graphs. The first is a scrolling plot similar to PingGraph, but the second is really interesting: It is a graph of the ping times of all the devices between the target machine and the machine running Ping Plotter. In effect, Ping Plotter is doing a traceroute - let me know if we need a Gearhead column on the way traceroute works.

Both graphs are updated on each sample, and samples can be taken at a rate of anything from one per second to one per hour. You can select whether the graphs display a specific range or autoscale to accommodate the maximum ping time.

What is really nice is that Ping Plotter colors the graphs: green for acceptable ping time; yellow for warning; and red for too long. The thresholds can be specified.

Ping Plotter has a sophisticated alerting system with complex rules that determine what conditions will trigger warnings.

You can define an alert condition as occurring when the average ping time of a number of samples is exceeded, or by the number of times a threshold is exceeded over whatever number of samples you like.

Alerts can be sent by e-mail (with control over how often e-mail should be sent to prevent you from being flooded with warnings), logged in a file or they can trigger an audible warning.

If you opt to log ping data to a file, there's a menu item that copies the entire application display to the clipboard so you have a snapshot of your connection performance.

I really like these tools. PingGraph is simple and useful, while Ping Plotter does a lot more at the cost of some complexity. These are tools that should be in everybody's tool kits.

So what simple tools do you recommend? Ping Gearhead at gh@gibbs.com.