Network services monitoring and ping

I'll start with the story. When we first developed Ping-Admin.Ru , we decided right away that we will not do ping verification. Yes, most of the monitoring services have such a check, but we refused it and here's why:

1. Most users will choose exactly ping for testing, without thinking about what ping actually does.
2. If the address is pinged, it only means that the server itself is turned on and the OS is running on it. And the fact that Apache works there, DB, mail does not mean at all. And therefore often there are situations when the address is pinged, and the site at this address does not open or opens with an error. Those. you must always monitor the necessary service on the server, and not just ping the address.
3. If the address does not ping, then it means nothing at all, because Blocking ICMP packets is quite common, which is why the ping does not go through, but everything else works fine.

But just a few days ago such a letter arrived:

I serve a number of offices that have servers running on FreeBSD and which serve as a router.
Of course, they will call me if some server stops working, but I would like to know about it more quickly.
And specifically to raise Apache servers or something else just to check whether the server is working or not, somehow I really do not want to.

There really is nothing but ping (if you don’t take any utter distortions), it’s impossible to test the servers.

So, we hasten to share the good news, we have a ping. Now the site address: Ping-Admin.Ru has become even more justify its name :-)