Note: Most Core routers which your traffic passes through do not prioritize the ICMP protocol responses used in a ping test. For that reason, and due to other factors, you might observe losses in your tests of the in-between hops. This is completely normal and is not a reason for the issue you are observing. Your tests can show a problem on a network level if they have losses to the end destination IP. If that is the case, it is necessary to check your connection. Please test towards other destinations, international and Bulgarian based, when submitting them.
The Windows command is tracert followed by the destination IP / Domain Name. On Linux it is traceroute. The logic in the results is the same, regardless if we are using Linux or Windows. We can use either Domain Name or IP. The DNS is going to translate it.
First is the HOP number. It shows us which HOP are we on in the connection path. The most important thing here is to check the three numbers following it. They show us the RTT (round trip time), meaning how long it takes for the packet to arrive at its destination and return back to our device. The measuring unit is ms (milliseconds). The columns are three because the traceroute sends three messages in total for better consistency. The last column after the three numbers is the device’s IP address and domain name on the corresponding HOP. In the middle of the test we can see Request time out but it is not always a cause for trouble. Some devices simply block packets from traceroute or ping (Windows – ICMP / Linux – UDP). The times in the RTT columns are an important thing to observe in this test. If we determine a high latency in the first few HOPS, then it means we could have an issue on the local LAN level. If we find out a high latency level on a certain HOP and it continues with a constant increase, then that could indicate a problem at the point where the increase first began.
In our case 11 is our last HOP, the default tracert is 30 HOPS maximum. If we want to increase the default HOPS we can use the parameter -h followed by the number of HOPS.
It is much more detailed than Traceroute and shows us the packet loss percentage on the different HOPS. MTR can be used with Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. To use MTR with Windows you will need to download the Windows version WINMTR. To install MTR on MAC OS you can use Homebrew and Macports. Depending on the specific Linux distribution you can install with the following commands: apt-get install mtr or yum install mtr (RHEL, Fedora).
Iperf is a client-server bandwith test tool between two hosts. It can be used both on Windows and Linux, usually only with CLI. On one side we have a server that “listens” by default on port 5201. To start the server we use the command: iperf3 -s. If we want to change the port the server “listens” on we can use the parameter -p. On the other side the client needs to use the following command to connect to the server and start the test: iperf3 -c the server’s IP. After a few seconds (10 by default) we will see the results. If we want to increase the test’s duration we use the parameter -t.