One of the first troubleshooting tasks is checking the network connectivity between a client (or server) computer and another server computer. The client and server computers can be on the same physical subnet, or thousands of miles away and separated by routers. In order to provide a successful service to a client, your infrastructure needs to enable clients to connect to.
Traditionally, you might have used tools including Ping, Tracert, and Pathping. You can continue to use these Windows console applications within PowerShell—they work the way they have always worked. You may find even more useful, two newer cmdlets available with Windows Server 2016 which have additional useful features. The cmdlets also return output as objects which makes it easier to utilize the cmdlets on a PowerShell script.
This recipe uses one console command (Ping.exe, or just Ping in PowerShell) and two cmdlets, Test-Connection and Test-NetConnection. The Test-Connection is an older...
