A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute

AKA, everything you’ve wanted to know about Traceroute but have been afraid to ask.

In 2009 at NANOG 47 Richard A Steenbergen (aka RAS) gave a talk titled: “A Practical Guide to (Correctly) Troubleshooting with Traceroute”.

This presentation is very thorough and breaks down how the tool works, how routers (and their interfaces react), how to interpret the results, and as a result how to use Traceroute to properly troubleshoot.

While I cannot recommend this presentation enough, I find myself constantly explaining mid hop latency. RAS very succinctly explains this on Page #37 “Spotting The Fake Latency Spikes”. Understanding this will save you untold time and grief when troubleshooting.

The full presentation is available below, it’s really worth your time to read.

https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=https://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog47/presentations/Sunday/RAS_Traceroute_N47_Sun.pdf