🏓Exploring Variants of Customized Ping Tools for Troubleshooting Network Issues ⚆

Network troubleshooting often begins with one of the simplest yet most effective tools—ping. This tool, used to test the reachability of a device across a network, is often the first step in diagnosing connectivity issues. However, as networks have grown more complex, so too have the tools available for troubleshooting. Variants of ping have been customized and expanded to offer deeper insights into network performance. In this article, we'll explore two powerful variants of the basic ping command—extended ping and mtr—as well as an open-source visualization tool called prettyping, and how they can be used for advanced network troubleshooting, especially within SD-WAN environments.

Cisco’s Extended Ping Tool | The Original Power Ping

Cisco’s extended ping tool was one of the first significant upgrades to the traditional ping command. Available in the Cisco CLI, extended ping allows network engineers to customize the ping operation with various parameters, enabling more precise troubleshooting.

How Extended Ping Works

Unlike the standard ping command, which simply sends ICMP Echo Request packets and waits for a reply, extended ping offers a series of customizations that make it much more versatile. These include:

• Source IP Address: Extended ping allows you to specify the source IP address of the packets, which is incredibly useful for testing connectivity from different interfaces on the same device.

• Packet Size: You can set a custom packet size, which is crucial for diagnosing issues related to MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) mismatches.

• Ping Count: You can specify the number of pings, allowing for longer or shorter tests.

• Timeout Value: The tool lets you customize the time that the device waits for a response, making it easier to troubleshoot latency issues on slow or congested networks.

• Data Pattern: Extended ping can change the data pattern within packets to help diagnose problems caused by specific byte sequences.

These customizations make extended ping a fundamental tool in Cisco networks. It's a quick and reliable way to identify problems such as packet loss, latency, or network misconfigurations.

Prettyping | A Visual Enhancement for Linux

In the Linux world, you can achieve similar functionality with an open-source tool called prettyping. This tool, available on GitHub, takes the standard ping command and enhances it with a visually appealing, color-coded output.

How Prettyping Works

Prettyping creates a visual representation of network latency in real-time by using colored bars to represent round-trip times (RTTs). The tool provides an intuitive way to see the consistency (or lack thereof) of your network connection. However, one of the key factors to making prettyping useful is to set appropriate values for rttmin and rttmax. By default, these values are set too high, which can result in minimal color variation, making it harder to discern performance issues.

To get the full benefit of prettyping, it's important to tune these values based on your specific network. For example, on a local network with low latency, you might set rttmin to 0 and rttmax to 50 milliseconds. This configuration allows prettyping to display a full color range, making network anomalies more visually apparent.

Using Prettyping in SD-WAN Environments

One of the great features of prettyping is its ability to bind to different network interfaces. In an SD-WAN setup, where multiple interfaces and paths are used for redundancy and performance, prettyping can provide immediate feedback on path quality by displaying color-coded latencies for different routes. This allows network engineers to quickly identify poor-quality links or interfaces that might be experiencing congestion or packet loss.

MTR | Combining Ping & Traceroute for Fast Diagnostics

While ping gives you a basic idea of whether a network device is reachable, MTR (My Traceroute) offers far more detailed insights by combining the functionality of both ping and traceroute into a single, fast tool.

How MTR Works

MTR starts with the functionality of traceroute, mapping the route that packets take through the network, but adds continuous ping measurements to each hop along the way. This means that while you're seeing the route your packets take, you're also seeing real-time latency and packet loss for every device along the path. Unlike the tracert tool in Windows, which can take a long time to complete, MTR is much faster and provides immediate results.

MTR updates continuously, giving you a live view of how latency and packet loss change over time at each hop. This is invaluable for diagnosing intermittent network issues, such as those caused by faulty links or congestion at a particular hop along the path.

MTR in SD-WAN Troubleshooting

In an SD-WAN environment, binding MTR to a specific interface allows you to test different network paths and interfaces, offering insights into how each path is performing. One caveat, however, is that ICMP-based testing (which is what ping and MTR traditionally use) can sometimes fail to provide reliable results in SD-WAN environments, especially if certain paths deprioritize ICMP traffic. In these cases, switching to TCP-based MTR can be more effective for diagnosing problems along SD-WAN paths, as it uses the same protocol that many critical applications rely on, providing a more accurate representation of real-world performance.

The Importance of Using Multiple Tools

One of the most important takeaways when troubleshooting networks is that no single tool can provide all the answers. While extended ping, prettyping, and MTR are incredibly useful, they should be used in conjunction with other diagnostic tools to get a comprehensive view of network health. Tools like packet captures, SNMP monitoring, and SD-WAN-specific telemetry complement these ping-based tools by offering additional data points.

When used correctly, these ping variants allow engineers to troubleshoot and resolve network issues faster and with greater precision. In SD-WAN environments, where multiple paths and interfaces need to be constantly monitored for performance and reliability, tools like prettyping and MTR can quickly highlight issues, while the extended ping functionality allows for more granular testing of specific network segments.

Wrap

Customizing ping tools like Cisco’s extended ping, prettyping, and MTR offer a variety of ways to diagnose network issues. They provide flexibility and insights that the traditional ping command can't match. In SD-WAN environments, where multiple paths and interfaces must be managed for optimal performance, using these tools to quickly identify and troubleshoot path quality issues can dramatically reduce downtime and improve overall network reliability.

By leveraging these enhanced ping tools, network engineers can go beyond basic connectivity checks and gain a more detailed understanding of network performance, making it easier to identify the root cause of problems and ensure that the network continues to operate at peak performance.

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Ronald Bartels ensures that Internet inhabiting things are connected reliably online at Fusion Broadband South Africa - the leading specialized SD-WAN provider in South Africa. Learn more about the best SD-WAN in the world: 👉Contact Fusion🚀

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