Ping is basic — what are the alternatives?

Almost every Software Engineer would have come across this handy tool(ping) at least few times in his/her life. But it looks like stone age tool now, what are the better alternatives?

Alternatives for Checking Reachability:

• hping3 -c 5 -S www.example.com: Sends 5 custom TCP SYN packets to www.example.com. Useful for testing firewall rules or checking if a web server is responding.
• fping -g 192.168.1.0/24: Pings all IP addresses in the subnet 192.168.1.0/24 simultaneously. Quickly checks which devices are online.
• arping -c 3 192.168.1.100: Sends 3 ARP requests to the device with the IP address 192.168.1.100. Verifies the presence of a device on the local network.

Alternatives for Checking TCP Connectivity:

• nmap -Pn -p 80 www.example.com: Checks if port 80 (the standard web server port) is open on www.example.com, regardless of whether it responds to ICMP pings.
• telnet www.example.com 80: Attempts to establish a Telnet connection to port 80 on www.example.com. If successful, the connection will be established (you'll see a blank screen).
• curl -I https://www.example.com: Retrieves the header information of the website www.example.com. If successful, the response will contain headers like HTTP…