Ping, however, is just one of many useful and free management utilities readily available to network managers. In a large enterprise, such tools can be used to supplement commercial management tools and platforms. In a small environment, they may be all you have. It's surprising how much free stuff is available. In addition to utilities such as ping and traceroute that ship with Unix and other operating systems, shareware and freeware management tools abound.
Some managers use the tools in conjunction with major network management software.
Others use them as a backup system if the management platform fails. Still others depend on the tools everyday. Over the past 20 years, the school has grown from a few hundred nodes to 13,400 connections. But once the scale gets large enough, there is a tendency to develop frameworks to use the tools together and to design common databases to help correlate their data. Real network management for large networks probably can never be done cheaply.