A single ICMP target is a night light. It tells you the house has power. It does not tell you whether the kitchen circuit tripped. When work VPN, Cloudflare DNS, and a game shard can fail independently, you want more than one night light.
A useful four-target layout
- Gateway — is the LAN alive?
- A public IP (1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8) — is the ISP path alive?
- Your resolver or a hostname you actually use — is DNS failing while raw IP still works?
- The thing you care about right now — Zoom relay, git host, or game server.
When DNS is the only red light, you do not reboot the router. When only the game server is red, you do not file an ISP ticket. When everything past the gateway is red, you do.
How PingStatus shows this without opening a dashboard
Pro can watch extra targets and fold their health into a quadrant status icon in the menu bar. You see four connections at once instead of cmd-tabbing through a window. Combined with gateway detection, that is usually enough to name the broken hop in a few seconds.
Do not flood a host
More targets does not mean a 10 ms interval to a stranger’s server. Keep intervals sane. PingStatus lets you change interval and timeout so you can monitor without looking like an attack. That is also why a dedicated tool is safer than a shell loop you forgot about.
PingStatus Pro monitors extra hosts and shows them in the menu bar so you can see which path failed.
Get PingStatus on the Mac App Store