Performing a ping programmatically

Daily Knowledge Drop

A Ping class is available in the System.Net.NetworkInformation namespace - this class facilitates performing ping operations (as the name suggests), on a hostname or IP address from code.

Usage

The usage of the class is straightforward - declare an instance of Ping, and call the SendPingAsync method:

using System.Net.NetworkInformation;

var looping = true;

// format asynchronously on a separate thread
Task.Run(async () =>
{
    // create an instance of the Ping class
    Ping pinger = new Ping();

    // loop until the user presses a key
    while (looping)
    {
        // ping and get the response
        PingReply response = await pinger
            .SendPingAsync("alwaysdeveloping.net");

        // extract response information
        Console.WriteLine($"Ping to '{response.Address}' took " +
            $"{response.RoundtripTime}milliseconds and the response " +
            $"was: `{response.Status}`");

        // wait 250ms before pinging again
        await Task.Delay(250);
    }
});

// wait for a key press
// and then cancel the looping above
Console.ReadKey();
looping = false;

A sample response:

Ping to '192.11.119.201' took 604 milliseconds and was: 'Success'
Ping to '192.11.119.201' took 307 milliseconds and was: 'Success'
Ping to '192.11.119.201' took 307 milliseconds and was: 'Success'
Ping to '192.11.119.201' took 321 milliseconds and was: 'Success'
Ping to '192.11.119.201' took 311 milliseconds and was: 'Success'
Ping to '0.0.0.0' took 0 milliseconds and was: 'TimedOut'
Ping to '192.11.119.201' took 307 milliseconds and was: 'Success'
Ping to '192.11.119.201' took 620 milliseconds and was: 'Success'
Ping to '192.11.119.201' took 308 milliseconds and was: 'Success'

Notes

While there are better and more featureful (and more expensive) 3rd party tools available for monitoring the status and uptime of a website, with Ping a simple, small application could be written to ping on an interval (as in the above example) and send out an alert if numerous timeouts are received.

References

Davide Bellone Tweet

Daily Drop 153: 05-09-2022

At the start of 2022 I set myself the goal of learning one new coding related piece of knowledge a day.
It could be anything - some.NET / C# functionality I wasn't aware of, a design practice, a cool new coding technique, or just something I find interesting. It could be something I knew at one point but had forgotten, or something completely new, which I may or may never actually use.

The Daily Drop is a record of these pieces of knowledge - writing about and summarizing them helps re-enforce the information for myself, as well as potentially helps others learn something new as well.