Pingelist

Pingelist is a term used in network diagnostics to describe a structured collection of ping measurements collected across hosts or over time. A pingelist typically records fields such as timestamp, target host, round-trip time (RTT) in milliseconds, packets sent, packets received, and a success flag, and may also include jitter estimates. The name is a portmanteau of ping and list and is used in various open-source scripts and dashboards to organize data generated by ping operations.

Format and storage of a pingelist can vary. Common implementations store entries in plain text, CSV, or JSON, with each line or object representing a single ping result for a given host and time. A typical entry might include: timestamp, host, rtt_ms, packets_sent, packets_recv, and a boolean for success. Because pinglists can aggregate results from multiple hosts, they often serve as a compact snapshot of network reachability and latency at a given moment or as a time series over an interval.

Applications and benefits include simple aggregation of latency data, ease of visualization, and lightweight monitoring without specialized instrumentation. Pingelists are particularly useful for quick health checks, trend analysis, and detecting intermittent connectivity issues. Their limitations reflect the behavior of ICMP-based measurements: results can be affected by rate limiting, firewalls, and host-specific ping implementations, which can introduce variability independent of actual network performance.

See also: ping, ICMP, latency, network monitoring, traceroute.