Network diagnostics guides and tutorials
42 cloud regions of Hetzner, OVHcloud, Vultr, Akamai and AWS measured from 33 cities: how many you need, which one serves where, and why routes matter.
Verified links to the official looking glasses of Arelion, Lumen, Cogent, NTT, Hurricane Electric, Tata, Zayo, Verizon and Orange, plus RIPE and PCH.
The exact traceroute command for Windows (tracert), macOS and Linux, the options worth knowing, and a real output explained line by line.
Find the AS number of any IP address with whois, bgp.he.net, and RIPEstat. Learn what ASNs reveal about network ownership, BGP peering, and routing behavior.
Trace a DNS resolution step by step with dig +trace, nslookup and drill, and debug NXDOMAIN, slow lookups and propagation issues with practical examples.
Learn how traceroute discovers the network path hop by hop. Understand TTL, ICMP, and how to interpret results.
Lag and high ping in online games? Use traceroute to find the exact cause of your latency and the hop where it starts, and what you can do about it.
ICMP, UDP or TCP traceroute? How each protocol probes the path, why firewalls drop some probes, and which one to use when a trace ends in asterisks.
Practical strategies to identify and reduce network latency using traceroute, CDN optimization, and routing improvements.
How DevOps teams use traceroute, ping, and DNS tools to debug connectivity in multi-region deployments.
10 traceroute tools compared for 2026, free and paid: mtr, WinMTR, PingPlotter, ThousandEyes and visual web tracers, with pros, cons and prices for each.
What an autonomous system is, how BGP chooses a path between 88,000 of them, with real AS paths from RIPE's collectors and from our own traces.
The rule that separates a real bottleneck from router noise, shown on real traces to New Jersey, Singapore and Sydney, and what to do next.
What latency is made of, the floor that distance sets, and real measurements from our servers to New Jersey, Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney.
Ping says how long a round trip takes; traceroute says where the time goes. Both run against the same host, real outputs, and which to use first.
MTR combines traceroute and ping. How to install it, the options that matter, and a real report from our servers read column by column.