Total Network Monitor is a network and local computer monitoring tool. It allows you to set up specific monitors on your local computers and those in your home network (or even through the Internet) to check their status, and to carry out specific operations.
The application comes loaded with 7 monitors that should give you a feel of what the application can do. Then it is up to you to customize those and create new ones to suit your needs. The built-in monitors carry out a few operations. For example, one of them is configured to ping www.google.com every 1 millisecond, to determine your computer's latency. The monitor displays a roundtrip time in milliseconds. Then, there is another monitor that checks the status of a single port. It tries connecting to it and if successful, it will show a green icon, and, if not, a red one. All of the monitors use colors to tell you if a monitor is working or not. From all the monitors that were enabled with this application, only HTTP and Ping worked for me. But I am sure that with a little tampering, I could get them to work.
For a free tool, Total Network Monitor is a nice application for network managers or aficionados. It is not very easy to set up, but it can be done.