I know that the service check_ping does a better test to see if the host is alive but why would you use one vs the other.
I know if all service checks fail a host check would be done last but I don’t get the reasoning behind it. Would it just be better to use
the service check_ping and not even bother with the host check ping?
By default, check_host_alive is defined as check_ping, but of course it doesn’t have to be, you can set it as whatever you like by changing the command object definition… like, maybe you don’t allow ICMP on your network, or even maybe you do but don’t want a lot of ping traffic back and forth so you don’t have a ping service check and just use it as the check_host_alive as a last resort…
‘Better’ is, as always, relative to your environment 