Alert Ping

Alert Ping is a network monitoring tool for Windows. It can be used to actively monitor computers on your home network or the Internet and see whether those respond or not.

The application is based on the basic ping test that can be performed from the command prompt on any computer. However, it goes one step further and it allows you to constantly ping a network host and see a graphical response for one or more computers in the form of statistics. For example, if you have a mail server and a web server on your home network, you can simply add those hosts to the application and start pinging them. When one of the computers becomes unresponsive (and thus stops replying to ping requests), Alert Ping will let you know. Apparently, Alert Ping can also e-mail you if such a thing should happen.

I believe such an application could be valuable for companies which operate their own servers. In theory, if a computer stops responding to PING requests, it also stops responding to other requests, and knowing about that is important. Alert Ping can also keep a track of your computer's uptime in its logs. You can even limit the size of log files so that no huge files are created.