PingKit

Network connections can be unstable for a myriad of reasons, ranging from the physical distance to the website’s servers to service providers not being able to cope with high traffic periods throughout the course of a day. As a result, troubleshooting the issues may be troublesome for those with remote media servers, which is where PingKit comes into play, offering an accessible ping testing app in a portable format for your convenience.

When launching the program, users are greeted to a straightforward interface with elements reminiscent of Google’s Material Design language for the Android smartphone operating system, boasting an elegant dark theme by default for a better usage experience during nighttime workflows. At the top sits a real-time chart that displays websites’ ping size development over a period of 60 seconds for users to spot discrepancies that can help them troubleshoot connectivity issues.

Underneath, one can add IP addresses with custom colors to compare and contrast them in the line graph and check if the location of various servers impacts their reachability and hinders their use case, while selecting custom intervals in seconds for more detailed assessments. The bottom of the app’s main section provides a quick look at the status and average ping in milliseconds for each web server, while the second tab provides users with an event log to track precisely when addresses are added.

Despite the app’s core features functioning well enough for a stable daily usage experience and the additional ability to increase the interface’s scale using the Control key and mouse scroll wheel for accessibility purposes, it does lack certain quintessential capabilities that users expect from a Windows program, ranging from the inability to resize its window or maximize it to make the most of the available screen space, to the absence of a system tray icon for easier access to its options.

Those in the market for a way to test the reachability of their media server while on vacation or troubleshoot connectivity issues on their main computer may find good use in PingKit’s straightforward feature set and notification capabilities that keep you informed of changes in websites’ response times while multitasking.