Ping Testing

Just a little bit about ping testing.  I have found over the years that sometimes a ping request will time out once during a ping -t and still not mean that it really timed out.  If it fails twice in a row, then sure, it failed to get the echo-reply back.  But how do you go about verifying that the one ping actually did fail (when there is only one failure)?  I use two different programs.  1. CMD, by doing a ping -t and 2. using PingInfoViewer.  If a ping times out in both programs, you can be sure that it was a failure.  If only in one program, then it was likely not really a failure, according to what I have experienced in the past.