ping, traceroute, and netstat are old command-line utilities, and like many utilities that have stood the test of time, they do their job so well that nobody saw fit to improve upon them in any significant way. These utilities can be used to test the reachability of hosts and provide information about routing and network connections. They are often the first tools used by network technicians and admins when testing networks, and they can be invaluable when troubleshooting network issues. ping and traceroute are both accessible from pfSense's web GUI, but they are more commonly used from the console.