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A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute

AndyH
Grafter
Posts: 6,824
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Registered: ‎27-10-2012

A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute

An interesting document - https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog45/presentations/Sunday/RAS_traceroute_N45.pdf
Designed more for networking admins, but some points are still applicable to end users.
The key points being:
- If there is an actual issue, the latency will continue or increase for all future hops
- Latency spikes in the middle of a traceroute mean absolutely nothing if they do not continue forward
- A traceroute shows you the forward path only, however the latency is the forward/return paths
2 REPLIES 2
jelv
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Re: A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute

I find pathping can sometimes be more informative in that it it will show where low level packet loss is occurring.
jelv (a.k.a Spoon Whittler)
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AndyH
Grafter
Posts: 6,824
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Registered: ‎27-10-2012

Re: A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute

Although with pathping, it's the same limitation. The ping response is the RTT, but you don't know if the packet loss is on the forward or return path.