We’ve always liked tiny single-executable utilities, the type you’ll find at NirSoft and Sysinternals. The developers don’t waste time with gimmicks, massive icons or interface themes: they just concentrate on the core functions you need to get the job done.

So it is with EasyNetMonitor, a free tool for monitoring the availability of network and web hosts. While not up to NirSoft standards, it crams a lot of functionality into its very compact file.

The program arrives as a 59.7KB archive, and unzips to a single executable. Launch this and it adds an icon to your system file.

To get started, right-click the icon, click Add, type the IP address/ computer/ host name of whatever you’re trying to monitor, and click OK. Repeat the process to add as many other devices as you like.

It’s only a 59.7KB download, but EasyNetMonitor still finds space to support email alerts

By default EasyNetMonitor pings each of your system every 10 seconds (you can change this to whatever you like). If there’s a problem it can play an audio alert, or even send an email notification.

This is much more configurable than you’d expect for such a compact program. EasyNetMonitor doesn’t just play a canned sound after one ping failure; you can have it wait for a number of consecutive fails, then play one of several system sounds, or a custom file of your own. It’s even possible to set the volume.

It’s a similar story with email notifications. You’re able to define a subject line, TO and CC addresses, configure your SMTP settings, even choose to send notifications only one per xx minutes (60 by default), so making sure you’re not deluged in alerts if a system stays down.

Other features include the ability to disable monitoring on demand, launch the program at startup, or log what the program is doing for reference later.

EasyNetMonitor could be better. We’d like to be able to add multiple systems from a single dialog. And for some reason the configuration file is saved in your Documents folder, although you can then copy this to the program folder to make it properly portable.

Still, on balance EasyNetMonitor is a very capable network monitor, far more configurable than it’s bulky competition.