This has been reported as critical, and you have been asked to troubleshoot this issue. A few employees working from a remote location have a server on the premises of the organization with critical application data, and this server has been responding very slowly for the past 30 minutes or so, resulting in a poor user experience. How is the TraceRoute tool useful for troubleshooting network issues?Īssume that you are a member of a network administration team for a large enterprise. Similarly, if there were latency issues for a device on the path, the response times for that device would be significantly high, which will help you identify the faulty device. If any packet loss issues were detected on the path, some or all of the corresponding response time values would be displayed as empty.Now the device's IP, the number of hops, and the response times are aggregated and displayed in a table, starting from the closest device and ending with the destination device. Once the packets reach the final step, the destination device sends the packets back to the source one last time.To ensure that the data is as accurate as possible, each packet is sent to every device a total of three times, and for each attempt, the average response time for the four packets is displayed in the results.For each step, all the metrics mentioned above are recorded. The same process is repeated for all devices along the path, with the number of hops progressively increasing as the packets move towards the destination.Now the IP of that device is recorded, along with the number of hops to reach that device (one in this case) and the response time. The nearest device successfully receives the traceroute request and sends back the four packets.Once a destination IP/DNS is provided and the command is executed, the device identifies the shortest path to the destination and sends four packets of data to the nearest device on the path.When you run a traceroute, these are the technical actions that are carried out: Traceroute is a very simple network operation, but it provides a lot of valuable troubleshooting data for admins. To accurately identify the source of response delays.To locate faulty configurations that create network loops, resulting in total packet loss.To identify latency or packet loss issues along the path.To ensure proper connectivity between devices by tracing each step along the transmission path.Traceroute can be used for the following purposes:
It sends a specific amount of data to your end device and checks if the data transmission occurs without any issues too and from the device. In the simplest sense, traceroute is a tool that is used to check the continuity of a network connection from a source to a destination device.
What is the purpose of a network traceroute tool?