Everyone knows ping. But over the decades, the networking community has quietly built an entire family of specialized variants — each solving a problem that standard ICMP couldn't.
A few examples of why you'd reach for something else:
tcping — when firewalls eat your ICMP and you need to test port availability
arping — L2 diagnostics and duplicate IP detection, no IP stack needed
fping — scan a /24 in seconds, all hosts in parallel
OWAMP — when you actually need one-way latency, not just RTT
dnsping — when the slowness lives in your resolver, not the network
I put together a comparison table of the most useful ones, across protocol, OSI layer, platform, multi-host support, and root requirements.
The OSI layer column alone tells you a lot — if you're reaching for ping to debug something that lives at L4 or L7, you're probably using the wrong tool.
What about Google? Anyone has any insights on their unit economics since they own the models and the infrastructure (which is also custom TPUs)? Are they doing better or are they in the same money losing business?