Troubleshoot your network with a new free tool – Traceroute NG

We are happy to announce the release of SolarWindsRegistered Traceroute NG, a standalone free tool that finds network paths and measures their performance.

The original traceroute is one of the world’s most popular network troubleshooting tools but it works poorly in today’s networks. You can read about its shortfalls in this whitepaper.

SolarWindsRegistered fixed these shortfalls with NetPath, a feature of NPM.  People love NetPath but there are two problems.  First, NetPath takes a couple minutes to find all possible paths in complex networks, much longer than a quick tool like traditional traceroute. Second, most people don’t own SolarWindsRegistered NPM and so don’t have access to NetPath.

Traceroute is too important of a tool to allow it to languish.  That’s why we’ve taken what we’ve learned with NetPath and fixed traceroute.  We call it Traceroute NG.

Traceroute NG is a super fast way to get accurate performance results for a network path in a text format that’s easy to share.

Compared to traceroute, TracerouteNG is:

  • Super-fast
  • Rarely blocked by firewalls
  • More accurate, thanks to path control
  • Updates latency/loss continuously
  • Detects path changes
  • TCP or ICMP

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You can download Traceroute NG here and launch the tool by double-clicking the traceng.exe.

You’ll be presented with a help screen and the application will wait for your input. Type the domain name to start a trace.

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You can also launch the free tool from Windows command prompt:

traceng www.google.com

Let’s look at some results.

Scenario 1: Endpoint is blocking TCP port

We all know that HTTP uses TCP 80 by default. What would traceroute show you if someone blocks that port on a firewall or webserver?

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All good, it’s not the network. You know it’s not your issue. But what is the issue?  That’s where Traceroute NG will help:

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Traceroute NG can mimic TCP application traffic, so packets are treated as the application traffic is. In this case it detected that port TCP 80 on the destination webserver is closed. You know, it’s not the network. But you can be more precise and tell your sysadmin to enable this port on his webserver.

Scenario #2: Network path change

To illustrate this scenario, I have created a simple network using GNS3.

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I also have a loopback adapter configured, to point all IPv6 traffic to this lab:

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I’d like to trace from my machine in Cloud1 to the PC (fc90::3). If the OSPF routing works, I should go through routers R1, R7 and R3. Traceroute confirms:

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Traceroute NG as well:

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What if I do maintenance on router R7? Will traceroute tell me, when router R7 becomes unavailable and detect the new path? No. It runs once and then you need to run it again. Manually.

With Traceroute NG, detecting a change is simple. You can tell Traceroute NG to warn you if the path changes and optionally log the output. An example command would be: -a warn -l -p 23 fc90::3

And this is the result:

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So you know that your router is down and once you hit enter, Traceroute NG will show you the new path. In the GNS3 lab we expect the new path will go through R1, R5, R2 and R3. Traceroute NG confirms:

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And the log file as well, showing you original path and the new path:

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In this use case, we have leveraged several features of Traceroute NG. First, it runs continuously. Second, it detects, when a path is no longer available. Third, it can log results in a text format, that’s easy to share.

Now, enough boring reading, it’s time to try it out! You can download Traceroute NG here: https://www.solarwinds.com/free-tools/traceroute-ng/

We’re super excited to share this tool with the world and hope you find it useful.  Let us know your thoughts!

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