Simple is nice sometimes but don't get a false sense of security with just a ping service. For example I've seen web servers soft-fail where they are still up

Simple is nice sometimes but don't get a false sense of security with just a ping service. For example I've seen web servers soft-fail where they are still up and still respond to ping but are serving empty blank pages. Checking for certain text to appear on a page is a better solution, then you can also monitor DNS lookup time, connect time, TTFB and download speed. Very easy to log and graph such data, in fact you can do it with curl in bash for the logging and email part.