Periodic Historical Traceroutes

One thing missing in an IT pros toolbox is traceroutes history and reverse traceroutes. It's easy to look at a traceroute when there is an issue but, what does a look like when everything was working fine? Did the route change? What were the service providers, cities and latencies involved when it was working fine?

And did you know that IP traffic is usually asymmetrical? This means that the route path from source to destination is usually not the same as it is from destination to the source. This is where reverse traceroutes (from destination to source) comes into play. This way, users have bi-directionnal traceroutes to troubleshoot faster and more efficiently. We wrote a complete blog post on this: Internet Traffic is Asymmetrical - How to Catch Reverse Path Issues?

The Periodic Historical Traceroutes feature is automatically enabled on all the Network Monitoring Sessions configured in the Obkio App. Every 10 minutes, the agents will execute the traceroute and send the results to the cloud. The results are available in each network performance monitoring session detail page.

The main objective of the Periodic Historical Traceroutes is to have a history of the traceroute to be able to compare between the routes when things were working well and when they are not. The Live Traceroutes are prefect for live troubleshooting and the Triggered Traceroutes are great for troubleshooting past network issues.

When received by our Cloud, the traceroutes are marked for deletion after a specific period of time. The time buckets are:

• Keep 100% of the Traceroutes for 2 days
• Keep 50% of the Traceroutes for 7 days
• Keep 2% of the Traceroutes for 180 days

The traceroutes settings can't be changed for the periodic historical traceroutes. Below are the values for each setting. Refer to the Traceroutes for the setting details.

• Count: 10
• Display: Hostname + IP
• Interval: 1
• Max TTL: 30
• Packet Size: 64 Bytes
• Protocol: ICMP
• ToS: Session TOS/DSCP Value

Traceroute is a powerful tool that is easy to misinterpret and derive false conclusions from. This is the main reason why we have spent so much time writing the traceroute series articles to help our users understand what they are reading when looking at a traceroute.