Handling problems monitoring low latency networks
Low-latency networks are often the ideal environment for monitoring; in a typical intranet, many hosts can be reached within a few milliseconds.
Monitoring tools, starting with the standard ping utility, usually remain easy to compare when response times are comfortably above the lower single-digit millisecond range. When latency drops to around 1 ms or below, small implementation differences between tools can become much more noticeable.
In practice, if you are dealing with very low-latency networks and it is important to match the values reported by the standard operating-system ping utility as closely as possible, you may prefer to replace default PING monitors with a wrapper around that utility or with a more specialized external tool.
Using wrappers around standard PING utility
IPNetwork Monitor is supplied with a bundled Python interpreter suitable for many custom monitoring tasks. Using this sample script, one can execute the standard Windows ping utility and extract performance data such as the average response time from its summary. The script requires the host DNS name ($HostDNS template variable) or IP address as a parameter.
Whereas that adds some insignificant delay to monitor polling time, it can provide users with the same results visible from default Windows ping tool.
You can also consider using alternate ping utilities.
PsPing from SysInternals
The well-known Sysinternals collection of tools includes PsPing, which can be a useful replacement or supplement to the standard ping utility.
PsPing supports not only ICMP ping, but also TCP ping, latency testing and bandwidth measurement. That means it can also be used as an alternative to a built-in TCP connectivity check when you need lower-level timing visibility for TCP-based services. Using the same wrapper approach, you can adapt the Python script above to call PsPing and return the measured value as monitor performance data.
fping tool
A general-purpose fping utility can also be useful here. It is similar to ping, but is especially effective when pinging multiple hosts and collecting ICMP-based statistics across IPv4 and IPv6 networks.
fping is primarily a Unix/Linux-oriented tool, so on Windows it is often most practical to use it through WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) or a POSIX-style environment such as Cygwin. You can consider fping as another replacement for the standard ping utility and use it through a corresponding wrapper script.
Conclusion
If you need assistance implementing any of the pinging approaches mentioned above, or if you have any related idea to offer, feel free to contact us.