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Database server drops off
The application server is fine, but the database host stopped answering. Every request now times out and you find out from an angry customer.
PulseStack opens a TCP connection to your server on a schedule, confirms it is reachable and measures how long the handshake takes. When it stops answering, you hear about it before your customers do.
Ping monitoring is on Starter and up, from £15 a month with a 14-day trial.
Live TCP connection attempt - exactly what PulseStack does on every check.
Ping monitoring watches the layer beneath your website. When the box itself falls off the network, there is no 500 to catch and no log line to read. Here is what that silence tends to cost.
The application server is fine, but the database host stopped answering. Every request now times out and you find out from an angry customer.
A routine patch reboot hangs on boot. The host is powered on in the console but unreachable on the network for hours.
A well meaning change locks the port shut. Traffic silently stops flowing and nothing in your app logs explains why.
Your host is healthy, but a routing problem at the data centre makes it unreachable from the outside world.
No agent to install and nothing to run on your server. Point PulseStack at a host and it starts checking from multiple locations.
Enter a hostname or IP address and the TCP port you want to watch.
Check as often as every 60 seconds, or every 30 seconds on Enterprise.
Choose how many consecutive misses count as down, so a single blip stays quiet.
Route failures and recoveries to email, Slack, Teams, PagerDuty and more.
Add your first host and watch it answer in real time.
Every cycle, PulseStack attempts a TCP connection to the host and port you chose. If the handshake completes, the host is reachable and we record the response time. If it fails or times out, that counts towards your failure threshold.
> connect db-primary.example.com:5432
reachable response 12 ms ok
> connect db-primary.example.com:5432
reachable response 11 ms ok
> connect db-primary.example.com:5432
timeout miss 1 of 2 warn
> connect db-primary.example.com:5432
timeout miss 2 of 2 DOWN
alert -> email, slack, pagerduty
> connect db-primary.example.com:5432
reachable response 13 ms RECOVERED
alert -> recovery notice sentOne monitor type, the full PulseStack toolkit around it. No feature gate on the essentials.
Mix and match everything under one login. Ping proves the box is reachable, the rest prove the services on top of it are healthy.
Confirm a host is reachable and measure response time
Watch status codes and response time on any URL
Alert when text appears or vanishes from a page
Check a specific service port stays open
Validate endpoints with custom request headers
Catch cron jobs and workers that fail silently
Detect record changes and resolution failures
Get warned before a domain lapses
These check different things. Most teams run more than one. Here is the honest breakdown so you pick the right tool per job.
| Question | TCP Ping | HTTP | Heartbeat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Confirms the host is reachable | Yes | Indirectly | No |
| Measures response time | Yes | Yes | No |
| Checks a web page or API responds | No | Yes | No |
| Reads status codes or content | No | Yes | No |
| Catches a job that never ran | No | No | Yes |
| Needs anything on your server | No | No | A ping in |
Keep an eye on database hosts, cache nodes and internal services that never serve a web page but still bring the app down when they vanish.
Watch a fleet of client servers from one account, with public status pages and per-client alerting that keeps everyone informed.
Prove your VPS or side-project box is still up without paying for a heavyweight platform. Starter covers 10 monitors for £15 a month.
Scale from a single box to two hundred monitors as you grow.
Alerts fire on failure and again on recovery, only after your chosen number of consecutive misses. Eight native channels, no plugins.
SMS and voice calls are an add-on, included on Team and Enterprise.
ICMP ping monitoring sends Internet Control Message Protocol echo requests to a target IP address or hostname at regular intervals and measures whether a response comes back. It verifies that a server, router, or network device is reachable and measures the round-trip time (latency) of each request. It is one of the simplest and most reliable ways to confirm that a device is online and responding to network traffic.
Ping monitoring operates at the network layer (Layer 3) using ICMP packets, while HTTP monitoring operates at the application layer (Layer 7). Ping tells you whether a device is reachable on the network. HTTP tells you whether a web server is returning the correct response. A server can respond to ping while its web server is crashed, and vice versa. Most teams use both: ping for infrastructure devices like routers and switches, and HTTP monitoring for websites and APIs.
Packet loss occurs when ICMP packets fail to reach their destination or the response fails to return. Common causes include network congestion, faulty hardware, misconfigured firewalls, ISP routing issues, and physical cable damage. Even 1% packet loss can degrade VoIP call quality, cause lag in real-time applications, and slow file transfers. PulseStack™ tracks packet loss rates per check and alerts you when loss exceeds your configured threshold.
PulseStack™ monitors any device reachable from the public internet via ICMP. For internal network devices behind firewalls (like office routers, NAS devices, or internal servers), you would need to either expose them to the internet or use a monitoring agent installed inside your network. Our checks run from 7 global locations, making them ideal for monitoring production servers, cloud infrastructure, edge nodes, and public-facing network equipment.
On paid plans, ping checks run as frequently as every 30 seconds from each monitoring location. The free plan supports 3-minute intervals. Each check measures round-trip latency, packet loss, and reachability from all configured locations simultaneously. With 7 locations checking every 30 seconds, you get hundreds of data points per minute for each monitored host.
Typical thresholds depend on your use case. For servers in the same region, latency above 50ms is worth investigating. For cross-continent connections, 150 to 200ms is normal. We recommend setting a warning at 2x your baseline latency and a critical alert at 4x baseline. PulseStack™ lets you configure custom thresholds per monitor, so you can set different expectations for a local database server versus a CDN edge node in another continent.
Yes. Single-location monitoring triggers false alarms whenever the monitoring server itself has a network blip. Multi-location ping from 7 locations uses consensus to determine if the target is actually down. If only one location reports failure while others succeed, PulseStack™ flags it as a regional issue rather than a full outage. This dramatically reduces false positives while still catching localised problems.
Yes. PulseStack™ supports monitoring both IPv4 and IPv6 endpoints. You can enter an IPv4 address, IPv6 address, or a hostname. When using a hostname, we resolve it using DNS and can check both A (IPv4) and AAAA (IPv6) records to verify dual-stack connectivity.
Jitter is the variation in latency between consecutive ping responses. High jitter indicates an unstable network connection that can degrade real-time applications like video calls and gaming. PulseStack™ calculates jitter automatically from the variance in response times across each check cycle and includes it in your performance reports. You can set jitter-based alert thresholds independently from latency thresholds.
All 16+ alert channels work with ping monitors: email, SMS, phone calls, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, webhooks, Zapier, and more. You can configure different channels per monitor, set consecutive failure thresholds to avoid alerting on transient blips, and enable recovery notifications so you know when a device comes back online.
Ping monitoring starts on the Starter plan at £15 a month with 60-second checks, or 30-second checks on Enterprise. Try it with a 14-day trial.
14-day trial. Cancel anytime.