Right, you need a second system that has ICMP access to the first system to run net_connect on.
I also see several interpretations of "monitor ping availability of" and if you are really testing if a given network adapter has network connectivity you could run the test the other way since generally, if you can't be pinged, then you can't ping out also so you could run net_connect on the system you are testing and ping out to known good systems that are only reachable on the network that the interface you are testing on has access to.
Or consider looking at the event log for the link up/down on the adapter or running a script locally to test the connectivity as Windows/Linux OS reports it.
That is all of course dependent on whether you have a working network connection to get that data off the system being tested.
-Garin