Overview

The Trace Route Plugin is an advanced tool based on the common trace route program available on all major operating systems. Its goal is to discover the intermediate router between LoriotPro and any IP address and to measure the time needed to reach each of them. With this tool network administrator could figure out where are the network bottlenecks and losses of performance along a path.

The screenshot below is a graphical view of the results of the trace route Plugin

Plugin Installation

The installation of the Trace Route Discover Plugin is performed in the Service workspace.
Select first the Service Tab in the Workspace, then press the right mouse button, you should see the contextual menu :

From there select Add New Service... and select the TraceRoute Discoverv plug-in.

When done you should see the Plugin in the list of Service Plugin.

A double click open the Dialog box.

Principle

The principle of any trace route program is based on the ICMP protocol. It uses the TTL field in the IP header of the packet. The main goal of the TTL field is to avoid infinite loop. By increasing the TTL by one each time the program send a packet each hops on the path are successively discovered and the time needed for a round trip is deducted.

Round Trip Time or RTT in an IP network is not enough to really know the time needed for an IP packet to travel from the source to a hop. The main reason is that the path from the query and its answer could be different, the second reason is the time used to process the requested packet by the hop.

Second point is that the sum of the time needed to reach each intermediate hops is not equal to the time need to reach the destination. Sometime one hops could be see at a longer time distance than the destination. This point is easily explained by the fact that router on the path are not dedicated to answer our ICMP packet and thus could add local delay in the round trip time.

Configuration

The configuration is done in the upper box of the dialog box.

The Trace is either the IP adress or the name of the remote host. You can acces the WIZARD with the + button.

Max Hops option defines the maximum number of hops (IP routers) to take in account on your graph and table . The maximum supported is 30.

The Timeout set the maximum time to wait before considering a hop unreachable.

Samples specifies the number of successive trace route performed. The RTT average values are more accurate if you increase this value.

The DNS Resolve option allows you to see name instead of IP address.

The Append Loriotpro Directory with new entry adds the new discovered hop (node) in the LoriotPro Directory.

Put new entry in existing network or dummy option adds new dicovered nodes in their IP sub-network or in the dummy network.

Check for SNMP 'public" and enable discover scanning for this nexhop if true option allows LoriotPro to use this new discovered hop (router) for extending its network view. Refers to the Discover process in the main documentation.

When finish, you can start the TraceRoute process with the start button.

Supervision

The start button displays the results in the table and graph view.

The table view contains the following columns.

The Hops column shows the number of the router on the path and a colored box shows the last status. The three states are linked to the specified timeout.

The MinRTT specifies the Minimum Round Trip Time recorded for that hop.

The AvgRTT specifies the Average Round Trip Time recorded for that hop.

The MaxRTT specifies the Maximum Round Trip Time recorded for that hop.

The CurRTT specifies the Minimum Round Trip Time recorded for that hop.

The Name is the DNS resolved name for the IP adresse of that hop.

The IP address

The graph display the current RTT

Visual results are also displayed on a concentric graphical view. The concentric view displays router and their status on its periphery. Loriotpro the source of the testing packets is located in the center. The first hop on the path is on the left side of the screen (9 o'clock)and subsequent hops are displayed clockwise.

Each line path is colored according to the legend located in the uper side corner.

Blue -> MinRTT
Red -> MaxRTT
Green -> AvgRTT
Yellow -> CurRTT

To have detailed information on a specific router, just set your mouse on it and read the information line in the bottom of the windows.

Copyright © 2004 LUTEUS SARL. All rights reserved. This documentation is copyrighted by LUTEUS SARL. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise, without the prior express written permission of LUTEUS SARL