We've all experienced that moment when something about your internet connection feels off.Maybe you're on a video call, and it is intermittently choppy, or maybe you're gaming and something is slightly weird about the way you're moving, so you launch into your usual troubleshooting procedure.One of the most basic network troubleshooting tools you can use is ping, but it isn't always easy to interpret those results, especially if something only goes wrong for a few seconds at a time and then stops.
That is exactly where gping shines compared to the built-in ping command.gping is ping with a fancy chart built in It builds on what ping does Close gping is a small terminal application written in Rust that plots response times as they arrive.You can run it on every major desktop OS, including Windows, macOS, Linux, or FreeBSD, as a single binary.
You don't need to install a daemon, create an account, or set up a web dashboard.It renders natively in the terminal to display a colored line graph.By default, you get a 30-second rolling window and a 0.2-second ping interval, which keeps the chart in motion.
While the graph provides the visual "feel" of the connection, per-host summary figures are displayed too, so you still have access to the actual numbers if you need them.A graph is easier for your intuition to grasp A string of numbers isn't easy to digest Despite how informative numbers can be, I don't find them as intuitive as a graph.I might see that numbers are changing, but I have to carefully scan them to see if there is a pattern.
A graph is better in that regard, especially since some network faults have distinct visual patterns.For example, a sawtooth pattern might be associated with bandwidth saturation or a Wi-Fi adapter in power-saving mode.Spikes appear as abrupt, obvious jumps, and missed packets create overt gaps.
This is especially useful for intermittent problems.A spike that occurs every 9.2 seconds is exceedingly obvious on a chart but nearly invisible in a wall of text.Because of the rolling window, your last 30 seconds of connectivity are always on-screen, meaning you don't have to scroll back through your terminal history to compare what you're seeing now with what happened 27.6 seconds ago.
Related I blamed my ISP for random Wi-Fi drops until I changed this single router setting The counterintuitive Wi-Fi fix that finally solved my random slowdowns Posts 2 By Monica J.White You can also make gping ping several targets simultaneously.For example, you could run gping (your router IP) (DNS IP) (website IP) and see all three results on the same chart.
If the problem is due to some issue with your router, the chart color associated with the ping to your router will reflect that problem, and the other colors will probably mirror that very closely.Similarly, a totally normal ping with your router but weird results to your DNS server suggests that the problem isn't with your network.That kind of quick visual inspection can be the difference between glazing over while looking at a deluge of network data and quickly identifying that the problem isn't fixable on your end.
You can use the -c or --color flags to assign specific colors to targets to keep the lines straight.Some arguments worth knowing Once installed, there are a few flags worth trying out immediately: -b 60 — Increase the window to a full minute of history.-n 1 — Slow the interval to one ping per second.
-4 or -6 — To force a specific address family.-i — To select a specific interface, which helps when testing Wi-Fi against Ethernet on the same PC.--cmd — It graphs command execution time instead of ping.
When you're done, just press q or the Escape key to quit.Don't treat it as a monitor It is for diagnostics only Gping is a handy tool for what it is, but it is a long-term monitoring solution, however satisfying it might be to watch the chart.If you're trying to figure out what your ping is doing over the course of a few minutes, it is the right tool.
If you need long-term tracking, you should stick with tools like Uptime Kuma or SmokePing.It's a small upgrade to a command I run all the time gping doesn't rework the classic ping command that you normally use; it just changes how the information is presented to make it more digestible at a glance.That means there isn't much to learn beyond "What does this pattern indicate?" I've been using gping as a full-time replacement for ping for a few weeks now and have found it fits into my workflow quite naturally.
I recommend against aliasing ping to gping, though.I tried it briefly, but gping doesn't take all of the arguments that ping can, so it broke commands and scripts I'd found on the web or vibe-coded.
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