Pingotron Pro 4.2.0

To tell you the truth, I only downloaded this program because its name is quite fancy. However, Pingotron proved to be quite a useful tool for monitoring computers over a network, or even over the Internet. This application works by sending ICMP (Ping) packets and detecting whether the remote host responds to them. If the remote host doesn't respond after a certain timeout its status is changed to "down".

You can configure the program to perform up to 20 consecutive attempts, before deciding whether the remote host is really "down". It's also possible to configure the ping interval (duration between attempts). The timeout, size, and TTL value of the ping packets can be configured separately, for each host that you monitor.

The main purpose of this program is to notify you whenever loss of service occurs. There are four ways through which the program notifies you. It can send an e-mail, sound an alarm, or modify its tray icon. The fourth way of notifying you is the "network notification". Unfortunately this feature doesn't come with any documentation, so there's no way of using it.

Pluses: Two extra utilities are built into this software (ping and traceroute). These utilities can be used to do extra maintenance tasks and network diagnostics. However, the feature which I like most, is the program's ability to draw graphs containing information about the way your network performed over time. The response time and the packet loss can each be displayed in a separate graph.

Drawbacks / flaws: The help file could be improved a bit.

In conclusion: Pingotron is a good utility, which can monitor a network through ping requests.

version reviewed: 4.0.9