ping-monitor skill

Overview

This skill performs ICMP health checks for hosts, phones, and daemons using the system ping utility. It provides a simple command-line interface to verify network reachability and basic responsiveness of any target address. No additional installation is required if the system ping command is available.

How this skill works

The skill invokes the native ping tool to send ICMP echo requests to the specified target and parses the results to determine reachability and packet loss. You can run a default single check or specify a count to collect multiple samples. It reports success/failure and basic timing statistics so you can detect intermittent outages or high latency.

When to use it

• Verify whether a server, network device, or phone is reachable over IP.
• Quickly check reachability from a host without needing extra tooling or dependencies.
• Monitor simple service availability as part of a script or cron job.
• Diagnose intermittent connectivity or high-latency issues with basic timing metrics.
• In automation workflows where a lightweight network health probe is required.

Best practices

• Run multiple pings (--count) to avoid false negatives from transient packet loss.
• Combine ping checks with higher-level service checks (HTTP, TCP) for complete health monitoring.
• Use consistent scheduling and logging when integrating into automated monitoring to track trends over time.
• Run checks from the same network location that represents your users to get meaningful latency and reachability results.

Example use cases

• Quickly verify a remote server is online before SSH or deploy operations.
• Confirm a SIP phone or IP phone is reachable on the LAN during troubleshooting.
• Script a periodic cron job that pings a critical daemon and alerts on consecutive failures.
• Include lightweight reachability checks in CI pipelines to gate network-dependent tests.
• Collect simple latency samples from different hosts to compare network paths.

FAQ