MTR Check to Monitor Packet Loss

2022/10/06 by Leave a comment

Packet loss and routing issues can impact any provider. Our newest check type, MTR, can help you detect and pinpoint the root of the problem. Faster detection and troubleshooting means less downtime for your websites and services.

The MTR command line tool has been around since 1997. Ask any graybeard sysadmin, they’re sure to be familiar with it. It’s great for revealing the presence of packet loss on a host and where along the route that packet loss starts.

Since routing is different for IPv6 than IPv4, you’ll want to create 2 MTR checks per host – one for your IPv4 address and another for the IPv6 address. You can either force IPv6 DNS resolution on your FQDN or use the IPv6 address itself as the check target.

MTR results from our probes is only half the story though. To get the full picture, you may need to run an MTR from your server. Use NodePing AGENT software to run MTR, PING, and nearly all our other check types from your server. It’s like having your own private NodePing probes. Results are quickly pushed to NodePing for processing and notifications.

No other network tool is more widely used among sysadmins for troubleshooting connectivity issues than MTR. Now you can automate it on both sides of the network using NodePing’s new MTR check.

If you don’t yet have a NodePing account, please sign up for our free, 15-day trial. Your graybeards will thank you.

Filed under Announcement, MTR Tagged with ,

Diagnostic Tools

2017/02/02 by Leave a comment

“Why is my check failing?”

It isn’t always obvious what’s causing the failure when a check does ‘down’ and additional information about what our probes are experiencing can be helpful. For example, if your website is timing out, is it the web server, a DNS problem, or maybe packet loss on the network?

Our new diagnostic tools allow you to run several utilities on our probes and give visibility to what our probes are seeing to help you troubleshoot a failing service. These tools can be useful to narrow down where the failure is so you can get things fixed and services restored as quickly as possible.

Tools available:

  • Ping
  • Traceroute
  • MTR
  • Dig
  • Page Load (browser loading with page speed – HAR viewer)
  • Screenshot

More information about the tools and some troubleshooting advice can be found in our documentation.

You can find these tools on the “Diagnostic Tools” tab when you login to your NodePing account.  If you don’t yet have a NodePing account, you can create one and try out these tools with our 15-day, free uptime monitoring trial.

What other tools would be helpful on that page? Let us know in the comments.

Filed under Announcement, Browser testing, DNS, HTTP Parse, MTR, NodePing Updates, PING, Screenshot, Traceroute Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,