Reachability and round-trip latency
Reachability: confirm the host responds on the network. Latency: round-trip time in milliseconds, showing how fast the path is. Loss: the proportion of probes that don't return — a signal of instability. Ping is a network tool that uses ICMP to test reachability and time how long a small packet takes for a round trip.
Why Ping is not monitoring
A server can answer pings happily while a failing power supply, a degrading RAID array, or a creeping intake temperature quietly head toward an outage. Ping tells you the host is up, but cannot reflect underlying hardware health, configuration drift, or business impact — and those are precisely where most data center failures begin.