Advanced Settings
Check MTR fi-hel-aluy.check-host.eu
Global MTR (My Traceroute) & Routing Diagnostic Tool
MTR works by sending packets with incrementing TTL values. The first packet expires at the first router, the second at the second, and so on — each router that drops a packet sends back an ICMP time-exceeded message that reveals its address and latency. The result is a hop-by-hop map from the probe node to your destination, with latency and packet loss measured at each step.
Hop-by-Hop Packet Loss and Latency
Ping only tells you whether the destination answered and how long it took. MTR shows you every router on the path in between. If the 8th hop out of 14 suddenly shows 40% packet loss and higher latency, and all subsequent hops look normal, the problem is almost certainly at that specific router or the link immediately after it — not at your server. That level of precision cuts diagnosis time significantly compared to ping alone.
BGP Routing and Suboptimal Paths
BGP selects routes based on AS path length and local policies, not physical distance or link speed. Traffic from one country to another sometimes crosses unexpected continents because of peering agreements between carriers. Running MTR from multiple locations reveals whether different ISPs take different paths to the same destination, and whether any of those paths are significantly longer or more congested than they should be.
Reverse DNS (PTR) Resolution
Each hop IP is resolved to a hostname via reverse DNS. Carrier hostnames often encode the location and provider — something like "ae-3.r21.frnkge04.de.bb.gin.ntt.net" tells you this is NTT's backbone in Frankfurt. This makes it straightforward to identify which transit provider owns each segment of the path. One thing to keep in mind: a hop showing 100% loss while subsequent hops respond normally is almost always ICMP rate-limiting, not a real outage — the router is forwarding traffic fine but deprioritizes generating TTL-exceeded replies.
Globalhost
Globalhost
Sponsored by Globalhost d.o.o. - Web Hosting Solutions
Marc Fischer - Packets-Decreaser
Equinix FR7
Sponsored by Packets-Decreaser Hosting