I know what SNMP is and I know what ping is. What is meant by a 'SNMP ping'? SNMP can be used to see if devices on a network are still alive.. what does it use to do this? I wouldn't have thought an SNMP ping is the same as an ICMP ping?
Answer
As you correctly suspected SNMP "ping" is definitely not the same as ICMP ping. What it does is to try to retrieve some basic information through SNMP like DNS name, system name, location, system type, system description etc. and if successful the "ping" is deemed to be successful too.
But this is not any kind of standard the way ICMP Ping (echo) is. There is no special "ping" command in SNMP - it's just a name for a tool used to scan whether SNMP is alive at some target device (by retrieving some common MIB values). So as you would expect the implementation differs too as a consequence of it being a useful tool rather than a standard.
But that has little effect in practice as there is a set of 'mandatory' SNMP records so if a device does not respond to those, you can be pretty sure it doesn't run SNMP. For an SNMP "ping" to work SNMP MUST be enabled on the target device of course ... which isn't the case by default most of the time in general so that's a big difference to ICMP Ping which can be used almost universally.
I hope I answered your question