Sunpower fun

The Sunpower Monitoring device appears to be very frequently pinging (~ every 5 seconds) a few EC2 instances (ec2-50-18-211-78.us-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com, ec2-52-7-213-242.compute-1.amazonaws.com) and Googles DNS server (8.8.4.4).  Pinging 8.8.4.4 seems like a very odd decision.  First off, does Google actually support pinging 8.8.4.4 or might this just up and disappear?  Why do they need to ping 3 hosts every 5 seconds?  Detecting connectivity once every few minutes seems plenty for any use?