Ping an IP Address
Ping an IPv4 or IPv6 address and see who operates it — reverse DNS, ASN, network and country — alongside the latency and packet loss.
Pingr needs a quick check that you are a person before running more tests. This usually resolves by itself.
Why this is a separate tool
An address on its own tells you almost nothing. 8.8.8.8 is memorable; most addresses are not, and the useful question about one is rarely “how fast is it” but “what is it, and who runs it”. So this page pairs the ICMP measurement with the registry and DNS information that answers that — and it accepts addresses only, because a hostname question is a different question and belongs on the Ping Test.
What each field means
Reverse DNS (PTR) is the name the address’s owner has published for it. It often reveals more than the forward name does: a machine called ae-3.edge4.Frankfurt1.Level3.net is a backbone router, and ec2-52-1-2-3.compute-1.amazonaws.com is a cloud instance. A great many addresses have no PTR at all. That is completely normal and is not a fault.
ASN is the autonomous system number — the identifier of the network that announces this address to the rest of the internet. Organization is who that network belongs to. Between them they answer “is this Google, a hosting company, or somebody’s home broadband”, which is usually the real question when you are looking at an address in a log file.
Country is the registry’s idea of where the address is used. Treat it as a strong hint rather than a fact. Anycast addresses are announced from dozens of countries at once, and a network can register a block in one country and use it in another; IP geolocation is accurate at the country level most of the time and much less accurate below it.
Special-use addresses
Some addresses are reserved and mean something specific rather than identifying a host on the public internet: 127.0.0.1 is loopback, 192.168.x.x and 10.x.x.x are private, 169.254.169.254 is the cloud metadata service, and fe80:: addresses are link-local. Pingr will not send packets to any of them — a public tool that reaches into private networks on request is a security problem — but it will tell you what the address is for, which is usually what you wanted to know anyway.
IPv6
IPv6 literals work exactly the same way: enter 2606:4700:4700::1111 and you get the same measurement and the same enrichment. Note that a host’s IPv4 and IPv6 addresses can behave quite differently — different routes, different congestion, sometimes different servers entirely — so if you are chasing an inconsistency, testing both is worth doing.
If the address does not reply
The same caveat as everywhere else on this site applies: silence on ICMP is a fact about ICMP, not about the host. Firewalls drop echo requests as a matter of routine. The enrichment above is still accurate when the ping comes back empty, and if you want to know whether the host is actually up, try a TCP port — a refused connection proves it is there.