gping

Gping is a command-line tool that pings a server or website and displays the results as a live scrolling graph in your terminal, instead of printing a row of numbers for each packet. Ping is the basic network diagnostic that checks whether a remote computer is reachable and measures how long a response takes. Gping makes those response times easy to read at a glance by plotting them as a moving chart.

You can run gping against multiple hosts at once, and each one gets its own line on the graph in a different color. This makes it easy to compare network latency to two or more servers side by side in real time. Colors can be assigned using named values or hex codes.

Beyond pinging hosts, gping has a flag that switches it into command mode. Instead of measuring network latency, it repeatedly runs a shell command you provide and graphs how long each run takes. This can be useful for watching how long an operation takes over time, such as a web request or a file download.

The tool is built in Rust and works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Installation options are extensive: Homebrew, Scoop, Chocolatey, apt, pacman, and many other package managers are supported, and there is also a Docker image for running it without a local install. For AWS infrastructure, it supports shorthand addresses like aws:eu-west-1 to ping specific cloud regions by name.

Options include adjusting the time window shown in the graph, changing the update interval, and using simple dot characters instead of the default braille-style characters for terminals that do not support them.