Are there any routers, firewalls between the servers that may block ICMP? Some places do not block ICMP traffic, some do though (to protect the database network for instance).

If so, the ping test may not work for you.

In addition to the ping test during processing, you may want to establish a ping test prior to processing. This could help eliminate network timeout issues when processing is just starting.

Whatever level of ping test you try, make sure there is a method to capture it out to a log file so that can be used to show the Network guys the problems.