Usage Scenarios

We've developed this page to further assist you in finding the right Pingman Tools product for your troubleshooting and/or network monitoring needs. We'll start out with a relatively high level description of each product, and then discuss some typical and real-life examples of how we envison the products being used.

MultiPing

MultiPing is designed around the premise of monitoring a large number of hosts or devices. This tool is a great resource if you're simply needing information on the uptime and latency of a network-connected target (and aren't particularly concerned with the full route to that target). There are quite a few different scenarios where MultiPing can be a great asset to you:

  • Monitoring all the active devices on your home network. *Almost* everything is network-connected these days - and you can use MultiPing to discover the devices connected to your home network, and get alerted if something goes offline that shouldn't (like that leak sensor under your sink...)
  • Monitoring a large amount of IP cameras. MultiPing provides a great way to keep track of which of your IP cameras are responding, and can notify you if one (or more) happens to go down
  • If you're a gamer, VoIP subscriber, or stock trader - MultiPing can help you pick the best server to make sure you're getting the best performance possible. You can set up a list of possible servers you might use, and sort them by latency, packet loss, or more - and choose the best performing one out of the group

Example:

We had one user describe to us how he's using MultiPing to monitor the websites he's selling space to on servers he owns. He typically has 15-20 sites on each of these servers, and he's using MultiPing to watch those sites for uptime and also utilizing the alert functionality to email an alert to him whenever one of those sites stops responding. The beauty of this is that within one application he is able to watch those, say, 20 sites. With MultiPing's timeline graphs he also has the ability to scroll back in time and watch the response times of those sites so he can see if there were issues during a particular time during the day, or on previous days he had that instance of MultiPing watch those sites.

PingPlotter Standard

PingPlotter's emphasis is on long-term monitoring and troubleshooting of the entire route to a particular host. Where PingPlotter really shines is the ability to watch a route and graphically show you what may be causing poor performance. There are a variety of scenarios where PingPlotter can help your troubleshooting efforts:

  • If you rely on a network or internet service which is having problems, and you need to know if the target network connection is down, if the service itself is down, or if the network connection going into that service is the source of the problem.
  • If a service provider is telling you that it's your problem, not theirs, but you've had your side checked out and need to show your provider where the problem really is.
  • If the ability to see trends over time about how your network is performing is important to you.
  • If you suspect that you're having bandwidth related problems, but you're not sure.

Example:

We know of one customer that was having intermittent problems with a VPN connection between Idaho in the United States and Australia. He set up PingPlotter to trace between his location and the host in Australia. When his users would call saying that performance was slow to the web application they were using in Australia - he was way ahead of them; as he'd used PingPlotter's alert capability to setup an email alert when the last hop (in this case the gateway for the LAN that had the webserver) had poor performance. What he saw was that two hops away from the gateway the ISP in Australia had a 10GB router that was showing significant packet loss whenever his users were experiencing problems. He was then able to send his PingPlotter data to the ISP and get the router fixed. He now has PingPlotter setup to save graph images every 30 minutes - so his users can go look at the images and see if there were problems with the connection during a time period of sluggish performance.

In summary

So as you can see, both tools have both overlapping and unique features that between them allow you enormous flexibility to cover a significant number of scenarios. If you have numerous endpoints that you want to monitor, then MultiPing is most likely the product for you. If you need to diagnose and troubleshoot a problem with one of those endpoints, or need the ability to see how you're getting to a particular endpoint - then PingPlotter is most likely the best fit. If you want to monitor numerous sites, and then need the ability to diagnose and troubleshoot that problem - then both products in tandem could be the best fit for you. The beauty of it is that you have the flexibility with our products to craft your own solution that suits your particular need with easy to use, intuitive graphical tools.