MTR

MTR is a powerful network diagnostic tool which combines the power of both Ping and Traceroutecommands. It enables a server administrator to diagnose and isolate network errors and provide helpful network status reports.

Installing MTR

CentOS/Fedora

yum update
yum install mtr

Debian/Ubuntu

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get install mtr-tiny

Windows

There is a Windows port of MTR available here

Mac OS X

If you’re running a Mac OS X workstation, you may install MTR with either Homebrew, or MacPorts.

To install MTR with Homebrew, run: brew install mtr

To install MTR with MacPorts, run: port install mtr

Generating an MTR report

Since MTR provides a view of the route traffic takes from one host to another, you can think of it as a directional tool. The route between two points on the Internet can vary a great deal based on location and the routers that are located upstream of you. For this reason Acenet collects MTR reports in both directions for all hosts that are experiencing connectivity issues, or as many hosts as possible.

Acenet support will request “mtr reports” both to and from your domain/server if you are experiencing networking issues. This is because MTR reports will not point to errors from one direction when there is still a problem from the opposite direction. Having both reports is necessary to aid in the identification of issues and will be needed if a problem must be reported.

On a Linux or Mac OS X server, you can generate a report using the following

mtr --report [destination_host]

For example, to test the route and connection quality of traffic to google.com, you would run the following

mtr --report google.com

Within Windows, you will need to run WinMTR as Administrator, and enter the host/IP in the Host box, then hit the Start button.