How to Ping an endpoint with C#

How to effectively ping an endpoint in C#? Don’t use the HttpClient, when .NET provides a Ping class to perform all these operations.

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How would you know if a remote endpoint is up and running? When you use the command line, you can run the ping command and see the result, like this:

❯ ping code4it.dev

Pinging code4it.dev [165.22.65.139] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 165.22.65.139: bytes=32 time=17ms TTL=51
Reply from 165.22.65.139: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=51
Reply from 165.22.65.139: bytes=32 time=15ms TTL=51
Reply from 165.22.65.139: bytes=32 time=16ms TTL=51

Ping statistics for 165.22.65.139:
    Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
    Minimum = 15ms, Maximum = 20ms, Average = 17ms

But what if you need to fetch that result programmatically with C#?

HttpClient - a bad idea

The first approach you can think of is to send an HTTP request to that endpoint and to see if you receive some response.

private static async Task<bool> PingWithHttpClient()
{
    string hostUrl = "https://www.code4it.dev/";

    var httpClient = new HttpClient();
    HttpRequestMessage request = new HttpRequestMessage
    {
        RequestUri = new Uri(hostUrl),
        Method = HttpMethod.Head
    };
    var result = await httpClient.SendAsync(request);
    return result.IsSuccessStatusCode;
}

Notice that I don’t request the whole content, but I perform a HEAD operation to get only the response headers. To know more about this HTTP method, check out the MDN documentation.

So, what can we say about this snippet of code? Does it work? Yes. Is it the best choice? No. Why?

There are at least 2 cases that will show you why you shouldn’t use it.

What if the whole site is under authentication? Well, the site would be actually reachable, but since we are not including authentication headers or cookies, the IsSuccessStatusCode will return false. You can try it by setting https://httpstat.us/401 as hostUrl.

Also, let’s think about Web APIs. Usually, the root does not represent a valid endpoint. So, you will get a 404 instead of the expected response even if the system is working correctly.

Ping class: a better idea

The best and simples way to perform ping operations is relying on the Ping class on the System.Net.NetworkInformation namespace. This class allows you to ping an endpoint and to check all the values that you usually get when you run this command on the command line.

private static async Task<bool> PingAsync()
{
    var hostUrl = "www.code4it.dev";

    Ping ping = new Ping();

    PingReply result = await ping.SendPingAsync(hostUrl);
    return result.Status == IPStatus.Success;
}

Yes, that’s as simple as it appears! But let’s have a look at each line.

var hostUrl = "www.code4it.dev";

Here I’m defining which host must be checked. As you already do with the command line, you have to exclude both the protocol (http and https) and every following path and query string.

Ping ping = new Ping();

Simply, we are creating a new Ping object. No parameters in the constructor, no overloads. Easy-peasy.

PingReply result = await ping.SendPingAsync(hostUrl);

Here I’m performing the ping operation in the simplest way, by specifying only the destination host. Some other overloads allow you, for instance, to specify a timeout (in milliseconds) for the request.

Once you retrieve the PingReply object you can get some useful info:

public IPAddress Address { get; }
public byte[] Buffer { get; }
public PingOptions Options { get; }
public long RoundtripTime { get; }
public IPStatus Status { get; }

With the Address field, you can perform lots of operations, like mapping that IP address to an IPv4 or IPv6 address and get some advanced properties, like the AddressFamily. Or, simply, you might want to print the IP value, and you can do it with a simple ToString.

Of course, you can also get the RTT (round-trip time) expressed in milliseconds.

The last thing to check is the actual status.

return result.Status == IPStatus.Success;

IPStatus is an enum with lots of different values. Among them, we can find

public enum IPStatus
{
    Unknown = -1,
    Success = 0,
    DestinationHostUnreachable = 11003,
    DestinationProtocolUnreachable = 11004,
    DestinationPortUnreachable = 11005,
    TtlExpired = 11013,
    BadDestination = 11018,
    DestinationUnreachable = 11040,
    TimeExceeded = 11041
}

The synchronous way

We’ve seen how to ping an endpoint asynchronously. What if we need the synchronous way?

Well, there is also this possibility, but with a method called Send. I won’t repeat the example, it’s almost identical to the one we’ve already seen.

I just want to point out that the library has a small discrepancy in the names for the methods.

The asynchronous method that we’ve used before is called SendPingAsync, but the synchronous method is called Send. Where is the SendPing method? It doesn’t exist. And what about SendAsync? Well, it actually exists, but it requires different parameters and, even worse, it returns null instead of a PingReply object.

Bonus tip: how to get the Hostname for a URL

As I said, to perform a ping request you need to use only the hostname, and remove all the other parts of the URL, like the protocol, the query string and so on. If you don’t pass the correct value to the SendPingAsync method, you will get a System.Net.NetworkInformation.PingException exception with the message No such host is known.

How can you get only the hostname? You could parse the string, extract only the parts that you need using a regex or something similar. Or you can simply transform your URL into a System.Uri object and extract the host property.

var fullUrl = new Uri("https://www.code4it.dev/blog/openapi-code-generation-vs2019");
var host = fullUrl.Host; // www.code4it.dev

Easy, right?

Wrapping up

In my experience, I’ve rarely seen this way to ping an endpoint. In most of the projects I’ve worked on, we used the HttpClient way. But it was only because we didn’t know of the existence of this class.

If you want to know more about this class, you can directly refer to the official .NET documentation.

Also, remember that you can’t run the ping command on Azure App Service. If you are interested, have a look at this article where I explain why and how you can perform a similar operation.

Happy coding!