# List of hosts to ping?
**URL:** https://discuss.elastic.co/t/list-of-hosts-to-ping/120437
**Category:** Beats
**Tags:** heartbeat
**Created:** [February 19, 2018, 11:23am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/list-of-hosts-to-ping/120437 "2018-02-19T11:23:31Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@kottapar](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/kottapar)
#### Post date: [February 19, 2018, 11:23am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/list-of-hosts-to-ping/120437/1 "2018-02-19T11:23:32Z")
Hey guys, I was just wondering if it's possible to provide a list of hosts in the "hosts" field for the ping test.
For example, in our case we want to do a ping test to all the servers in the list /tmp/unixhosts. The documentation says comma seperated values.
```
- type: tcp
schedule: '@every 60s'
hosts: ["/tmp/unixhosts"]
ports: [22]
```
---
### Author:  [@steffens](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/steffens)
#### Post date: [February 19, 2018, 3:49pm UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/list-of-hosts-to-ping/120437/2 "2018-02-19T15:49:00Z")
The `hosts` field is a list (See [Config file format docs](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/libbeat/current/config-file-format.html#config-file-format)). You can either use `['url1', 'url2', ...]` or have one URL per line by writing:
```auto
- type: txp
schedule: ...
ports: ...
hosts:
- host1
- host2
- host3
```
As you have the list in an external file, you need to make use of config reloading using the [watch.poll\_file](https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/beats/heartbeat/current/configuration-heartbeat-options.html#monitor-watch-poll-file) setting. This one requires JSON, though.
---
### Author:  [@kottapar](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/kottapar)
#### Post date: [February 22, 2018, 10:26am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/list-of-hosts-to-ping/120437/3 "2018-02-22T10:26:07Z")
Thank you, although I was looking at something that'd just take a plain text file as an input 🙂
---
### Author:  [@system](https://discuss.elastic.co/u/system)
#### Post date: [March 22, 2018, 10:26am UTC](https://discuss.elastic.co/t/list-of-hosts-to-ping/120437/4 "2018-03-22T10:26:14Z")
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