Is my website up or down, is it responsive or is it taking to long to load? Those are questions that every webmaster needs to ask from time to time. The best way to find out is to use monitoring tools that connect to the website, server, domain or IP address regularly. You find lots of great applications, both on the web and as desktop applications, to monitor website

Ping Monitor is a desktop gadget for Windows that can monitor up to five local or remote servers. As the name suggests, it pings the servers in intervals specified by the user of the application.

All information are presented then as a graph and in averages on the Windows desktop.

Up to five different URLs or IP addresses can be added to the gadget. Ping Monitor supports both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. Enter an IP address or domain name in the first field, and an alias that is used to identify it in the second. The alias is shown on the main interface which is better than displaying IP addresses for instance. Still, you can select to use the domain name or IP address as the alias as well.

You can change the size of the gadget. You can also make changes to colors and the graphs under the other tabs in the configuration.

The gadget displays the maximum, average and current ping time as well as the number of errors while pining the server or IP address.

The graph visualizes those findings. You can ping a server manually with a click on the update icon next to the server's alias.

Ping Monitor is a handy gadget for Windows users who want to use the ping command to monitor websites or servers. The ping command is not as sophisticated as other server monitoring means, for instance by performing checks if a database is running on a server.