[formula_ninguna]

what's the use case of it?

[purrcat259]

I would guess: checking if machines are online without rolling an overkill monitoring solution. More of a smoke test than a proper solution (ping does not ensure a service is up for example).

[marlynm]

1) Finding other reachable hosts in a local network. 2) This can be slightly modified to get average latency for each host. This is not a replacement for health check.