How to Visualize Ping Responses on Linux With gping

ping is a simple yet essential tool for diagnosing network issues on Linux. It can help you check your network connection, see if a remote machine is online, and play a vital part in analyzing connectivity issues, such as dropped packages or high latency.

But as important as the ping command is, it’s not the most interesting to look at, and interpreting its output in a useful way can be difficult. gping is a graphical command-line utility with additional features which make it easy to visualize ping responses from multiple targets.

What Is ping, and How Does It Work?

ping is a Linux command which uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) ECHO_REQUEST datagram to elicit an ICMP ECHO_RESPONSE from a remote host. This means that if you:

ping google.com

…your computer sends a ping to google.com, and google.com echoes it back to your local machine.

The terminal output will display the remote IP address along with other information including the time it took for the response to reach your machine. ping will continue sending requests until you tell it to stop.

In addition to specifying the remote host, ping accepts a number of arguments of different utility, including timestamps, how many ping requests to send, and flood, which outputs packets as fast as they come back or one hundred times per second, whichever is more.

ping comes preinstalled on most Linux systems, but if you can’t find it on yours, install it with:

sudo apt install inetutils-ping

You can get command-line help for ping by running:

man ping

How Is gping Better Than Ping, and How Do You Install It?

gping doesn’t offer as many options as ping. You can’t use it to flood a target host, for instance, but it has a couple of killer features that make it stand out. The main one is the ability to ping multiple targets simultaneously and provide output as a color-coded graph.

This allows you to easily see the response of targets over time, and recognize patterns. This can help you tell if there are any issues with remote hosts, which is the optimal host to connect to, or if there is a problem with your own connection.

To install gping on Debian-based distros, first, add the PPA key to your sources:

echo "deb http:
wget -qO - https:

Now update and install gping:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install gping

Run the following command to install gping on Fedora:

sudo dnf copr enable atim/gping -y && sudo dnf install gping

On Arch Linux:

pacman -S gping

To install gping on Gentoo, run:

sudo eselect repository enable dm9pZCAq
sudo emerge
sudo emerge net-misc/gping::dm9pZCAq

If you have Snap on your Linux system, you can install the gping snap package with:

sudo snap install gping

How to Use gping to Visualize Ping Responses on Linux

gping is easy to use and accepts multiple hostnames as arguments. To see a ping response graph from BBC, Google, Bing, and CNN, you would run:

gping bbc.co.uk google.com bing.com cnn.com

…and gping will get to work pinging the specified hosts and graphing the results for your inspection. Colors are allocated by gping, although you can assign colors to individual hosts with the –color or -c switch:

gping bbc.co.uk --color cyan

You can also change the watch interval from the default 0.2 seconds value with the -n or –watch-interval flags.

That’s all gping does. While it doesn’t have the same breadth of configuration options as ping, it’s a powerful tool in the shed for anyone with an interest in networks.

Start a Career as a Network Engineer!

Getting a basic understanding of networks and responses is essential if you want to pursue a career as a network engineer, and both ping and gping can help you develop an instinctive grasp of how machines communicate across a network.

But they’re only the start of your journey, and if you hope to one day get a job in the field, you need to pursue proper certifications from teaching and awarding bodies.