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Make an MTR diagnosis

In certain situations, in order to help or validate a diagnosis, our teams may ask you to perform an MTR capture. Behind this barbaric name hides a very simple tool.

An MTR test consists in analyzing all the routers present between your connection and a destination host (most often your VPS). This allows us to effectively diagnose the path taken by your connection, as well as possible problems that may be located outside our network perimeter (there are many intermediaries between your ISP and our datacenter, the MTR allows us to know which intermediaries are present on the connection, and verify that they behave normally).

The MTR test is characterized by a list of routers (usually less than a dozen), as well as several pieces of information for each line:

The packetloss rate, which indicates the percentage of lost information between your connection and this router.
The last latency (in ms) recorded between you and this router
The average latency recorded between you and this router
The maximum latency found between you and this router

To be effective, an MTR test should be performed over several minutes (usually a quarter of an hour) in order to record as much information as possible.

How to perform an MTR test?

On Windows

Just download the WinMTR software and run it. In the window that opens, fill in the "Host" field with the IP of your server, or the one provided by the support. Then let the MTR run for 15 minutes and send a screenshot to the support.

On Linux and MacOS

The MTR program exists in CLI (command line) version in most package managers (apt, yum, homebrew, etc). Once installed, you just have to launch the MTR with the command "mtr IP".

The result is then displayed in your console. Just leave it in the background for 15 minutes, and take a screenshot to send it to the support.

If your ticket concerns disconnections, or problems encountered on your VPS, we strongly invite you to let the MTR run in the background, and try to reproduce the problem encountered. Once the problem has been reproduced, you will be able to shut down the MTR. If the problem is a network problem, it will have been captured by the MTR. If it is not network related, the MTR will be perfectly clean. In both cases, remember to mention that the problem occurred (or not) during the MTR. This will allow our teams to diagnose your problem more quickly.

An MTR consumes virtually no network resources. You can easily leave it running for a long time without any impact on your connection.

Updated on: 17/10/2022

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