How To: Use Terminal to Ping With Timestamp (For Network Troubleshooting)

On macOS, this is a useful Terminal command to ping a network device repeatedly at a set internal, and log the timestamp with the ping reply.

This technique is good to evaluate the availability of a network device over a period time, if for example you suspect that a device or server is dropping off the network randomly (or not responding) at certain times of day.

You can use the -i flag to set a longer interval in seconds, which makes the ping output log easier to look through over an extended period. By default, ping will run every second, which can make it rather tedious when looking back through your ping results to find any significant dropouts.

ping -i 10 8.8.8.8 | while read pong; do echo “$(date): $pong”; done

The above command will ping the IP address 8.8.8.8 (Google DNS) every 10 seconds (-i 10) and will timestamp the corresponding pongs.