Coding Challenge #5 Parallel Ping Tool in Go

DevOps Coding Challenge #2: Parallel Ping Tool in Go

Level: Intermediate
Language: Go
Focus: Concurrency, Networking, CLI Tools

Problem Statement

You're on-call and need to check the health of several servers — fast. Manually pinging each one is too slow and inefficient.

Your task is to write a Go program that accepts a list of domains or IP addresses, pings them in parallel, and prints the result for each target: response time in milliseconds or a timeout message.

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Requirements

The program must:

• Accept a list of IP addresses or domains as command-line arguments
  Example:

go run pingtool.go google.com github.com 1.1.1.1 8.8.8.8

• Ping all targets in parallel using goroutines and channels

• Print results in this format:

google.com: 24.3 ms
github.com: 61.1 ms
1.1.1.1: 8.7 ms
8.8.8.8: timeout

• Use a timeout of 3 seconds per ping

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Bonus Requirements

If you're up for a bit more:

• Save the results to a file named results.csv

• The CSV should have headers: host,response_time

• For timeouts, use the string timeout in the response_time field

Example results.csv:

host,response_time
google.com,24.3 ms
github.com,61.1 ms
1.1.1.1,8.7 ms
8.8.8.8,timeout

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Hints & Suggestions

• Use Go’s os.Args to read command-line arguments

• Use goroutines + channels to manage concurrent pings

• Use net.DialTimeout for simple ping-like behavior (since Go doesn’t support ICMP ping without root)

• Consider using the time package to measure durations

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Evaluation Criteria

• Code correctness and clarity

• Efficient use of Go concurrency features

• Handling of edge cases (e.g., unreachable hosts, no input)

• Bonus: Well-formatted CSV output

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