Live Traceroutes Feature

Today, we are proud to release a new core feature to our Network Performance Monitoring Solution: the Live Traceroute! With this feature, our users can troubleshoot network performance issues faster. Live Traceroutes show the forward and the reverse traceroutes with latencies and packet loss. It’s the perfect tool to pinpoint the location of network performance issues. Also, our users can share the results within their team but also with third-parties such as IT consultants or service providers.

Traceroute is the most popular tool that network engineers use to troubleshoot networks. It was invented in 1987 and is still highly relevant today. As its name suggests, the main purpose of a traceroute is to trace the IP route from a source to a destination inside an IP network. It shows to the user the routers but also the round-trip latency from the source to each of the routers.

To help everyone understand how to use traceroutes, we have written a series of articles on traceroutes. Subscribe to our blog for upcoming articles.

• What is a Traceroute and How Do Traceroutes Work?
• How To Identify Network Issues with Traceroutes?
• Why Do Some Routers Drop Packets or Have High Latencies?
• Decode the Hidden Information from Traceroute DNS
• Internet Traffic is Asymmetrical - How to Catch Reverse Path Issues?
• How to Share a Traceroute With an ISP NOC?
• Impact of Load Balancing or Multiple Paths on Traceroutes
• MPLS Networks, TTL Propagation and ICMP Tunneling

If you'd prefer to read about traceroutes in one document, download our free complete guide to traceroutes!

The Complete Guide to Traceroutes

Download Obkio's free Complete Guide to Traceroutes to learn to identify network problems with the most popular network troubleshooting tool for IT Pros.

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The live traceroute feature is used in combination with the network monitoring sessions. This means that a monitoring session must be configured between two agents to be able to use that feature. Inside the App (Web or Mobile), users can go to any network monitoring session page and click the Live Traceroute button to launch the live traceroute feature. Note that a separate live traceroute window (popup) is opened.

Below is a screen capture that shows how to do it.

In the live traceroute page, there is a button Share Link that can be used to share the page with someone else. People that use the link do not need to have an Obkio account or be logged into the App. The link is valid for 48 hours.

With this sharing feature, it is easy for our users to share the traceroute results with their colleagues, IT consultants but also their service providers’ support team. With access to the live traceroute feature, everyone will be able to troubleshoot as fast as possible. Faster network troubleshooting means faster fix and less pain for the end-users.

Traffic in IP networks is asymmetrical, meaning that the path used from a source to a destination is probably not the same used from the destination to the source. Network engineers will tell you, when looking at traceroute, you must have traceroute from both directions.

This is exactly what the live traceroute gives you. You can see, in real-time, the traceroute from both directions.

When the traceroute is not running, it is possible to change the settings of the traceroute.

You can change:

• the traceroute packet interval to have a more aggressive rate than the default 1 packet per second.
• the protocol used from the default ICMP to TCP and UDP and select random source and destination ports to detect multiple paths.
• the ToS (IP Type of Service) which includes the DSCP code to troubleshoot a specific QoS class of service similar to our QoS Monitoring feature.

To help users troubleshoot and solve different types of network issues, Obkio actually offers different types of Traceroutes.

• Live Traceroutes: To troubleshoot live network problems anywhere in your network.
• Triggered Traceroutes: To troubleshoot intermittent network problems.
• Periodic Historical Traceroutes: To troubleshoot past network issues.
• Obkio Vision Visual Traceroute tool: To easily view traceroute results on a graphical network map.

Triggered Traceroutes Feature & How it Works

Learn about Obkio’s Triggered Traceroute feature to help IT pros and network admins troubleshoot intermittent network problems with automatic traceroutes.

Learn more

As you see in the screen capture above, Live Traceroute is an advanced feature. Traceroute is a powerful tool that is easy to misinterpret and get to false conclusions. This is the main reason why we have spent so much time writing the traceroute series articles to help our users understand what they are reading. Subscribe to our blog for upcoming articles.

• What is a Traceroute and How Do Traceroutes Work?
• How To Identify Network Issues with Traceroutes?
• Why Do Some Routers Drop Packets or Have High Latencies?
• Decode the Hidden Information from Traceroute DNS
• Internet Traffic is Asymmetrical - How to Catch Reverse Path Issues?
• How to Share a Traceroute With an ISP NOC?
• Impact of Load Balancing or Multiple Paths on Traceroutes
• MPLS Networks, TTL Propagation and ICMP Tunneling

Every IT pro wishes that everything could run smoothly so they can work on new projects and deploy new infrastructure. But it is part of IT; things can break, capacity can be insuffisant or a configuration change can affect performance. At Obkio, we think that you should not rely on your users to raise performance issues.

Our solutions monitor the performance 24/7, establish a baseline for each network monitoring session and let you know if anything goes wrong. Feel free to contact us or book a demo to learn more about what we do.