Obkio’s Visual Traceroute Tool: Feature Release

Today, Obkio’s Network Performance Monitoring solution is announcing the release of our all-new Visual Traceroute Tool integrated into Obkio’s application. This feature is a re-invention of Obkio’s standalone Visual Traceroute Tool (Obkio Vision), and has been transformed to help users better understand network path performance and the source of network issues.

If you’ve ever tried troubleshooting network issues with a traditional traceroute, you know the drill: it’s clunky, it’s fragmented, and it’s usually reactive. By the time you think to run one, the problem is either gone or the test spits out results so inconsistent you’re left guessing.

• You never have the data when you need it.
• It’s never bidirectional.
• There’s no real historical visibility.

And let’s be honest, catching an intermittent issue with an intermittent tool is more luck than skill.

For years, traceroute has been the “break glass in case of emergency” tool for IT teams. It helps, sure, but it’s painful: juggling multiple tools, flipping between browser windows, and piecing together fragments of data while users are breathing down your neck, asking, “Is the network fixed yet?”

That’s the reality Obkio set out to change.

When we first built Obkio Vision about four years ago, it wasn’t the feature you see today. It started as a minimal viable product, a traceroute engine running locally on Obkio Agents.

The idea was simple: keep a continuous eye on network paths and give you more visibility when something went wrong.

And it worked. Even in that raw form, Vision quietly delivered value every day. But let’s be honest, it came with some serious limitations:

• Data was locked locally on each agent, with no backend integration.
• You could only see three hours of history at a time.
• Accessing it meant juggling separate browser windows outside the main Obkio app.
• Customers expressed that finding the feature was difficult and required extra steps.

So while Vision proved its worth as a concept, it lived in the shadows. It was useful, but hidden, more of a “secret weapon” than a core part of the Obkio platform.

Over the last two years, we set out to reinvent a beloved troubleshooting staple and make it simpler, faster, and easier to use.

From Periodic Traceroutes (every 10 minutes) → Triggered Traceroutes → Live Traceroutes → Obkio Vision’s visual traceroute → today’s reinvented Visual Traceroute tool, our goal has been the same: remove friction and help you troubleshoot in seconds, not hours.

After a complete refactoring, Obkio Vision has grown up. What started as a hidden visual traceroute tool is now a fully integrated, advanced feature at the heart of the Obkio platform.

• No more separate windows.
• No more three-hour limit.
• No more “secret weapon” hidden in the background.

Traceroutes now live side-by-side with your session monitoring, timelines, and exactly where you need them when something goes wrong.

Here’s what’s new:

Previously, Obkio’s Visual Traceroute was offered as a separate, standalone tool outside the app. With our brand-new release, Visual Traceroute is now built directly into Obkio: you can access it from any Monitoring Session page and add it to your dashboards as a widget by selecting the “Network metrics” type.

Now that the Visual Traceroutes are fully integrated into Obkio’s app, you can add them to your dashboards as customizable widgets, right alongside your network performance metrics, SNMP device data, and APM graphs for side-by-side correlation.

The widgets are fully responsive and flexible: on narrow screens, they simplify the traceroute to highlight key details, and on short (vertical) screens, they enable easy scrolling so you can navigate the full path.

Traceroutes aren’t just rows of hops anymore; they’re visual, interactive maps. This feature is a reinvention of the Network Map from Obkio Vision, previously a visual representation of paths to each destination. It’s now modernized, integrated directly into Obkio, and enriched with per-hop metrics and timeline context.

Metrics like latency, packet loss, and jitter are colour-coded along the path so you can spot network issues instantly. 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.

• Multi-destination view: Visualize performance, from one Obkio Agent to one or many other Agents, to compare different paths in a single view.
• Path & hop details: See the number of hops and the exact path to each destination, rendered in a clear, colour-coded layout.
• Per-hop insights: Latency, packet loss, and jitter are mapped at each hop so you can pinpoint where degradation begins.
• New tooltips on network map widgets:
  • Tooltips appear on mouse-over for each hop within a Network Map widget.
  • They include details like the hop’s IP address, quality score, and (when available) the hostname tied to that IP.
  • Hops that don’t respond to ICMP appear as empty nodes; the tooltip clearly states “No response from hop X.”

The old matrix of coloured dots is gone, replaced by a clean, interactive timeline that makes performance trends and anomalies obvious at a glance. Evolving from Obkio Vision, where the quality matrix first gave way to a timeline, this view now serves as your primary selector for both Visual Traceroute details and Network Path exploration.

Zoom in to choose the period that contains the events you want to investigate, then drill down to see hop-by-hop changes.

• Performance & path over time: The timeline visualizes Network performance and path changes so you can spot when and where routes diverge or degrade.

• Unified time selector: One timeline controls time across dashboards and session pages. Select a time range, and the entire page updates to that period. Click a specific spike/issue and the timeline zooms into that window, opening detailed Visual Traceroute and Network Path views for precise drill-down.

• Smart aggregation for long ranges: When you select a longer time frame, data is aggregated, and the worst outcome per interval is surfaced, helping you zero in on problem periods fast.

• Reused across views: The Visual Traceroute timeline is reused wherever time-based performance, path changes, and selection are needed, keeping the experience consistent and intuitive.

Instead of three hours, you now have several months of detailed traceroute history (depending on the selected plan), with precision down to the minute. That means you can go back, spot patterns, and troubleshoot long-standing issues that used to slip through the cracks.

Previously, this capability in Obkio Vision was limited, with few extra destinations and no alerting, so we rebuilt it end-to-end for deeper visibility and faster troubleshooting. Now you can monitor additional IP destinations right from your dashboards, with timeline correlation and (soon) alerts for reachability and performance thresholds (latency, loss, jitter).

• No extra agents: Point-and-monitor external or internal IPs alongside your existing sessions.

• Key alerts: Get notified on reachability and performance thresholds (latency, loss, jitter). (coming soon)

• Unified view: Investigate issues in the same Visual Traceroute maps and timeline you already use.

Previously, Obkio mainly monitored network devices, and the best practice is still to use SNMP polling on devices that aggregate data, such as bandwidth and throughput. But now, you can do more:

Use Cases

1. Important, Non-Network Devices: Monitor devices such as apps, servers, and printers by running traceroutes directly to their IPs using Extra IPs, without deploying any Agents.
2. Lower-Priority Network Devices: Use Extra IPs for simple up/down availability checks for devices like access switches, where SNMP data is not required.

1. Sign in to the Obkio app.
2. Go to the Network Performance tab.
3. Monitoring Sessions → You’ll see the Visual Traceroutes in the list.

1. Go to the Dashboards tab and choose an existing dashboard (or create a new one).
2. Click Add Widget.
3. Under the Network Metrics, select the “Agent” and “Sessions” that you’d like to visualize.
4. Then select Traceroutes under the “Graph Type.” You can also select the Network map “Graph Type” to add this widget.
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.

So why does all of this matter? Because troubleshooting isn’t about running random tools, it’s about getting answers fast. And that’s exactly what the new Obkio’s Visual Traceroute Tool delivers.

1. Innovation → Traceroute like you’ve never seen it before: continuous, visual, and actionable. With a minimum six months of history (depending on the plan chosen), one-minute granularity, and responsive maps, you can finally track down those elusive “once-in-a-while” issues.

2. Zero Configuration →Obkio automatically performs traceroutes across your monitoring sessions and to any Extra IP destinations without any extra configurations required.

3. Simplicity → Traceroutes, network maps, timelines, and monitoring sessions all live in the same Obkio dashboard. Unlike platforms that split these into separate modules, Obkio’s Visual Traceroute is fully integrated, so troubleshooting is simple and fast.

4. Automation → Correlate traceroute data with SNMP, LAN, gateway, and ISP metrics. That means you don’t just see the symptom, you see the root cause.

5. Competitiveness → Where most tools stop at basic ping monitoring, Obkio gives you extra IP destinations with full traceroute visibility and alerting built in.

This feature is foundational for our upcoming Automatic Correlation feature: automatic troubleshooting that ties traceroute path changes to performance signals (SNMP, LAN, gateway, ISP, and more) to surface probable root causes instantly. Continuous traceroute data is the core of our automatic diagnostics engine, and Visual Traceroute makes that possible.

At the end of the day, Visual Traceroutes change the game for everyone:

• IT teams get simplicity and faster resolutions.
• Network engineers get precision, depth, and long-term visibility.
• Executives get reduced downtime and peace of mind.

If you’re already an Obkio customer, you don’t need to do anything; the new Visual Traceroutes feature will automatically be available in your account. Take a few minutes to explore the new UI inside your dashboard. You’ll quickly see how much easier it is to spot, understand, and resolve network issues.

If you’re new to Obkio, this is the perfect time to give it a try. Sign up for a free trial and see for yourself how visual traceroutes transform troubleshooting. From pinpointing ISP problems to catching intermittent LAN issues, you’ll have the data and visibility you always wished traceroute could deliver.

We’re really proud of this new Visual Traceroute tool, and it exists because of the great feedback we received on our initial standalone version. Your input showed us how valuable built-in, visual, and interactive traceroutes could be, and we’ve delivered.

That said, we’re not done: more optimizations and improvements are already in the works for the feature. Please try the feature, give it a go, and share your feedback or recommendations so we can keep making it better!

We believe it is the most advanced visual traceroute tool on the market, and now, it’s fully integrated into Obkio’s app.