Ping any device
or server.

Ping monitoring checks whether a server or device is reachable, and how quickly it responds.

Each check sends a small ICMP “ping” to your target (IP or hostname). If the server is up, it responds. If it doesn't respond within the timeout window, it's marked as “down” and an alert is triggered.

Ping monitoring measures availability and response time.

Availability tells you whether your server is reachable with a simple up or down check.

Response time shows how long it takes for a signal to travel to the server and back, measured in milliseconds, and shows how quickly your server is responding.

UptimeRobot also tracks response time over time, so you can spot changes before a full outage happens.

A “good” ping depends on where your server is and where you're checking it from.

As a general guide:

• Under 50 ms is fast and healthy within the same region
• 50 to 150 ms is normal for most setups, especially across regions
• Above 300 ms starts to feel slow and is worth checking

Distance plays a big role. A server in Europe tested from the US will always have higher latency than one tested locally.

What matters most is consistency. If your server usually responds in 20 ms and suddenly jumps to 200 ms, that's a sign something changed, even if 200 ms isn't always considered slow on its own.

Ping monitoring checks if your server is reachable. Website monitoring checks if your site is actually working. Ping uses ICMP to confirm the server is online, and does not check your web server, app, or pages.

Website monitoring sends an HTTP or HTTPS request, checks the status code, and measures load time, all of which show whether your site is responding correctly.

Ping monitoring checks if a server is reachable, while port monitoring checks if a specific service on that server is working.

Ping uses ICMP to confirm the server is online, but does not check any applications or services. A server can respond to ping while a critical service is down.

Port monitoring connects to a specific TCP port, like 443 for HTTPS, 3306 for MySQL, or 22 for SSH, to see if that service is accepting connections.

You can monitor most devices with a publicly reachable IP address, including servers, VPS instances, cloud infrastructure, routers, switches, and firewalls.

The device must:

• Respond to ICMP ping requests
• Be reachable from the public internet
• Not block ICMP traffic at the firewall level

For internal or private network devices, you'll usually need a publicly exposed endpoint or another method of external access to monitor them reliably.

The most common cause is a firewall or security group blocking ICMP traffic from UptimeRobot's monitoring servers. Your server is up, but it's silently dropping the ping packets. Check your server's firewall rules and your cloud provider's security group settings (AWS Security Groups, GCP Firewall Rules, Azure NSGs) to confirm ICMP is allowed from external IPs. Also check whether a host-level firewall like UFW, iptables, or Windows Defender Firewall isn't blocking incoming pings. You can verify by running a manual ping from an external machine to your server's IP. Once ICMP is open, UptimeRobot's next check will resolve the alert automatically. The full list of UptimeRobot's monitoring IPs to whitelist is available here.

Yes. UptimeRobot accepts both raw IP addresses and domain names for ping monitoring. When you enter a domain name, UptimeRobot resolves it to an IP address before sending the ping.

One thing to keep in mind: if your domain points to a load balancer or CDN, the resolved IP address may vary between checks due to DNS routing. For consistent results targeting a specific server, pinging its direct IP address is more reliable.

You can check ping manually from any terminal by typing ping [hostname or IP], such as ping google.com. The results show response times and whether the target is reachable.

For continuous monitoring, create a ping monitor in UptimeRobot by entering the IP address or hostname you want to track and configuring your alert channels.

If you need help identifying IP ranges or subnet details, try our free IP subnet calculator.

Yes, UptimeRobot includes free ping monitoring with automatic availability checks, response time tracking, and email alerts.

Paid plans add faster monitoring intervals, more monitors, and additional alert integrations like SMS, voice calls, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and PagerDuty notifications.

UptimeRobot checks your server every 5 minutes on the free plan, and up to every 30 seconds on paid plans. Paid plans also include multi-location monitoring, so your server gets pinged from multiple regions at once, which helps catch localized connectivity issues that wouldn't show up from a single monitoring location on the free plan.