Friendly Pinger

Friendly Pinger is a seemingly outdated, yet feature-rich and practical tool that enables you to map your network in a graphical representation by adding workstations, routers, satellites, servers, hubs, printers, faxes, scanners, phones and other entities (even the communication tower), and establish relationships between them to accurately display your network at a large scale. It can be used for many reasons, from assessing your complete network status, to learning how a network works.

Installing Friendly Pinger is a fast and easy task that doesn't require special attention. It is wrapped in an outdated interface made from a large window with a toolbar and menu bar, showing a demonstration map at startup, so that you can get an idea on how to use it.

The best part about it is that multiple tabs are supported for working on multiple projects simultaneously, so you can keep the demo open and consult it when you get stuck attempting to create a map from scratch.

Basically, you can fill the map with numerous devices (as long as they exist in the list), draw lines between them to set relationships, as well as add labels and customize font properties in regard to the alignment, color, style, shadow and thickness.

Label details can be edited at any time, while devices can be copied, deleted, aligned and modified when it comes to their type. Friendly Pinger also lets you edit some device parameters concerning the polling mode (always on, bind to other devices, use plugin), label display, main and Ping image, along with the default external command.

As far as supported commands are concerned, you can Ping and TraceRoute selected devices, as well as enable notifications for when the device wakes up or shuts down. The application enables you to alter the inventory when it comes to general details (PC, Windows, collection time), hardware and software (e.g. add or remove components), as well as to examine history, edit the IP and MAC addresses, and more.

The program sports an impressive range of features and settings dedicated to graphically mapping a large-scaled network. It had minimal impact on computer performance and did not hang, crash or pop up error messages in our tests. On the other hand, its interface needs some major improvements.