if you can't ping the machine you can't get a network connection to it.
That's bad for you, but doesn't mean the server is down. It could be a firewall blocking the ping request somewhere which itself can either mean you're not allowed to access the machine or the machine ignores ping requests.

Send the server a request for whatever it's supposed to do. If you get a response back (assuming the server is supposed to respond) it's working.
And I assume you do log incoming traffic?