Obkio Visual Traceroutes

    What you are going to learn:

  • What are Obkio's Visual Traceroutes
  • Where to access Obkio's Visual Traceroutes
  • How to read and interpret Obkio's Visual Traceroutes

Overview
Overview

Obkio's Visual Traceroute feature allows gives users full visibility into the network path between two Monitoring Agents within the same Network Monitoring Session. It automatically collects traceroute data for each session and displays hop-by-hop performance metrics, including packet loss and latency.

A traceroute is performed every 1.2 seconds, and the results are aggregated in real time every minute.

This feature is automatically enabled for all Monitoring Sessions in Obkio's App and presents the results in two main forms:

  • Historical Traceroutes, showing how the route evolves over time.
  • Reverse Traceroutes, displaying the return path to help identify issues caused by asymmetric routing.

Included in all Obkio plans, Visual Traceroute helps network professionals validate routing behaviour and troubleshoot performance issues quickly and accurately.

How to Access Obkio's Visual Traceroutes
How to Access Obkio's Visual Traceroutes

Obkio's Visual Traceroute feature is fully integrated into the Network Monitoring Sessions. They run automatically as soon as a Monitoring Session is configured and can be viewed and analyzed from the Network Performance Tab.

How to Access Visual Traceroutes from Monitoring Sessions:
How to Access Visual Traceroutes from Monitoring Sessions:

  1. Click the the Network Performance tab in your Obkio app menu.
  2. Select the Network Monitoring Session you want to investigate. This will open a page with more details.
  3. Scroll down the page to view Obkio's Visual Traceroutes.

Obkio Visual traceroutes - How to access it

How to Access Visual Traceroutes from A Dashboard
How to Access Visual Traceroutes from A Dashboard

You can also add your Visual Traceroute data as dashboard widgets to any of your Obkio Dashboards.

  1. Go to the Dashboards tab and choose an existing dashboard (or create a new one).
  2. Click Add Widget.
  3. Under the Network Performance Metrics, select the Agent and Sessions that you’d like to visualize.
  4. Select Traceroutes under Graph Type.
  5. The widget will then be added to your dashboard. You can resize or arrange the widget as needed; it automatically adapts to your screen size.

Obkio Visual traceroutes - How to access it

How to Use and Analyze the Visual Traceroutes
How to Use and Analyze the Visual Traceroutes

Visual Traceroute displays the traceroute data in an interactive graph made that includes two sections:

1. Timeline Bar (top)
1. Timeline Bar (top)

  • A horizontal timeline uses coloured segments to show the overall quality of the network path at each moment.
  • Green indicates a good quality score, yellow indicates medium quality and red indicates poor quality.
  • Purple markers denote path changes, meaning the route between agents changed at that time.
  • Selecting a point on the timeline updates the hop details below.

Obkio Visual traceroutes - Timeline bar

2. Traceroute Table (bottom)
2. Traceroute Table (bottom)

  • Each row corresponds to a hop (router) along the route.
  • For each hop, the table displays the hop number, IP address/hostname, maximum packet loss (%) and maximum latency (ms).
  • The final row summarizes the total packet loss and total latency across the entire path.
  • When you hover over a hop, a tooltip shows the IP address, the reverse DNS hostname (when available) and the Quality Score.
  • Separated traceroutes tables are shown when the path changes, by clicking on the Show more button

Obkio Visual traceroutes - Traceroute table

3. Network Map
3. Network Map

Obkio's Visual Traceroutes also include Network Map graphs.

The Network Map displays all network paths from one source agent to multiple destination agents. Each discovered path is displayed, with hop counts and related IPs clearly labelled, giving you a colour-coded view of packet loss, latency, number of hops, and all alternate routes in one place.

The Network Maps can also be added as widgets to dashboards.

Obkio Visual traceroutes - Traceroute table

Traceroute Settings (default)
Traceroute Settings (default)

Obkio's Visual Traceroutes use fixed settings and cannot be modified by the user. The default parameters are:

  • Display: IP + Hostname – shows both the IP address and reverse DNS name of each hop.
  • Interval: 1.2 second – time between probes.
  • Max TTL: 30 – maximum number of hops.
  • Packet Size: 64 bytes – size of the ICMP packet.
  • Protocol: ICMP – Visual Traceroute uses ICMP echo requests.

Learn More About Visual Traceroutes
Learn More About Visual Traceroutes