Traceroute is one of the go-to tools when it comes to networking diagnostics, helping engineers understand the route a packet takes or pinpoint where it’s dropping when something goes wrong. However, as networks grow in complexity, Traceroute starts to run into limitations. That’s where Traceroute, the most recent addition to our Augtera Agent, comes in, offering advanced network observability and diagnostic capabilities. While Traceroute CLI is effective for basic path tracing, it falls short in scenarios with complex network architectures, intermittent failures, or route flapping. The Augtera Agent Traceroute solves this by providing periodic and on-demand TCP, UDP and ICMP based Traceroute functionality from an Augtera Agent to any endpoint with support for ECMP and a comprehensive UI. The UI provides a complete topology rendering of all discovered paths between source and destination. Augtera Traceroute also tracks key metrics like latency, hop-by-hop breakdowns, and provides reverse DNS lookup, so you know exactly which devices are involved.
Below is an example of the Traceroute UI, rendering multiple discrete paths between the selected host and destination. This feature works for any routable IP, whether inside or outside your infrastructure. Additionally, it provides latency and loss to each responding hop, which can be leveraged with our purpose-built, real-time AI/ML to reveal anomalous behavior along each path. Highly configurable, the UI allows tuning of protocol methods, ports, and frequency. It also integrates historical data storage, enabling you to review the network’s state, as well as any anomalies, at specific points in time.
To demonstrate the utility of this feature, we’re going to examine a particular customer finding, that if left undiscovered, could have caused a significant outage. In one of our customers’ production networks, we observed a critical issue: multiple routes were incorrectly converging on a single Layer 3 routing instance, effectively creating a bottleneck and single point-of-failure between availability zones. With over 15 paths affected, this misconfiguration posed a risk of a major outage. This type of issue would be extremely difficult to detect using the CLI version of Traceroute. With the Augtera UI, however, the customer was able to quickly visualize this network imbalance and pinpoint the misconfiguration.
If you’re facing complex network configurations or want to ensure maximum visibility into your traffic flows, the Augtera Traceroute can be an invaluable tool. Reach out for a demo or see how it can give your team the visibility it needs to prevent outages before they happen.
To schedule a 30-minute discussion with an engineer on how Augtera Network AI can help with your network challenges please contact us. Thanks for reading our blog.
