Published on: 01.08.2019

ping is a great tool to check if some computer/server/router/camera (any IP addressable device) is online.

For me, it is useful when restarting the virtual machine and using ping with -t flag for constant checking when a machine is online so that I can check if everything is working as it should.

Just to get some context, at that time one of my responsibility was for 120 virtual machines in one organization.

Some virtual machine where web servers, although ping was useful for me to know when a machine is back online, but would be more useful is to know when the web-page is online.

That got me thing, that it would be great if I had some kind of ping for HTTP.

Luckily it exists and it is called httping.

If you use Chocolatey installation is easy with choco install httping.

From my experience httping is working fine, as expected.

Only issues that I have found is that often web server is online, even a few minutes before the web-page that I need is online.

This is not a problem of httping, normally web-server is online before the web-page, especially is web-page is some complex web application.

Next step would be to find some httping tool with grep capability.

I could build that toll myself probably in a few hours (with Python), but currently, there is no cost-benefit for my use-case.

If you know some tool with those features, feel free to leave a comment.