The Scenario
You're a network operations engineer. A new project baseline requirement just landed in your queue: document round-trip times and reachability for 90 server hostnames and IP addresses before the capacity planning review. Your team lead asked for it in a spreadsheet. The review is Friday.
Today is Wednesday.
The bad version:
- Open MX Toolbox, go to Ping, paste the first hostname, wait for the ping test, note the average response time and whether the host was reachable, go back to the sheet, enter the values.
- Work through 89 more hosts, getting slower as the afternoon wears on because some hosts are timing out and the interface requires you to wait for the full timeout before returning a result.
- Finish with a table that has 90 rows but 15 of them are missing the ASN column because you ran out of patience with the ones that were slow.
Ninety manual pings is not a baseline measurement exercise — it's an endurance test.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads your host list and through its built-in MX Toolbox integration runs ping tests against every entry, writing response times, TTL, ASN information, and reachability status directly into the sheet.
Ping each host in column A using MXToolbox and write the average response time in ms, TTL, ASN information, and whether the host is reachable into columns B, C, D, E
What You Get
- Column B: average round-trip time in milliseconds for each host — blank for unreachable hosts
- Column C: TTL value from the ping response
- Column D: ASN information — autonomous system number and name
- Column E: REACHABLE or TIMEOUT — immediately visible without scanning the response time column
- All 90 rows, consistent formatting, no entries skipped because the host was slow
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Hostnames and IP addresses are mixed in column A
For each entry in column A, check whether it is a hostname or a bare IP address, then run the appropriate MXToolbox ping test for each, writing average response time in column B, TTL in column C, ASN in column D, and REACHABLE or TIMEOUT in column E
Need to flag high latency as a separate category from timeout
Ping all hosts in column A using MXToolbox, write the average response time in column B, and classify each in column C as OK if under 50ms, HIGH-LATENCY if between 50ms and 200ms, CRITICAL-LATENCY if over 200ms, or TIMEOUT if unreachable — sort so TIMEOUT and CRITICAL-LATENCY rows appear at the top
Hosts are split across two sheets — Primary and Failover
Run MXToolbox ping tests for all hosts in column A of the Primary sheet and the Failover sheet, write response time, TTL, and reachability into the adjacent columns on each respective sheet, then create a Comparison tab showing side-by-side latency for any hostname that appears in both sheets
Full baseline report with summary statistics
Ping all hosts in column A using MXToolbox, write response time, TTL, ASN, and reachability into columns B through E, then add a summary row at the top showing: total hosts tested, count reachable, count timeout, average response time across all reachable hosts, and the three slowest hostnames
Baseline documentation that actually supports capacity planning decisions.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your host inventory, then ask it to run ping tests across column A. Related: Bulk DNS Health Check or the MX Toolbox overview.