How to run MTR on Windows and Linux

MTR is a tool used to check network connectivity. The MTR output contains information about the entire route a packet takes from the source server to the destination server.

MTR is an extended version of traceroute/tracert: it determines the path to a given host while displaying the percentage of responses, as well as the response time of all network transitions (hops) in the route in real time.

If you encounter any issues with the network on your server, make sure to check your MTR outputs first, since they can tell you a lot about the issues you're experiencing. 

How to perform MTR?

WinMTR

WinMTR is the most useful utility if your local computer or server is on Windows. Let’s check how to run MTR on Windows machines.

1. Open and run WinMTR:
2. In the Host field, type the domain name of the IP of your server;
3. Click Start and wait for the results. You should receive something similar to this:
4. If you see any issues, significant packet losses, etc. contact our Support Team with screenshots of the issue, we will investigate your outputs.

MTR on Linux-based machines

Usually, our Support Team requires MTRs from your computer (done with WinMTR mostly) to your server, and from the server to your local host.

As we have already checked how to run WinMTR, let’s check how to run MTR command on a Linux server.

1. If not already, make sure you have MTR tool installed on your Linux server. You can do it with the following commands:

apt-get -y install mtr 

or

yum install mtr – y

The command depends on the OS of your server.

apt-get would be used for Debian and Ubuntu OS, and yum would be used for RedHat based operational systems.

      2. After you’ve successfully installed MTR on your server, simply run the mtr command with your IP:

mtr [insert your IP or domain]

      3. You should receive similar outputs: 

      4. If you notice any issues, significant packet loss, etc. please, let our Support Team know about this and provide screenshots indicating the issue. We will investigate this for you!

How to understand if there are issues in the MTR output? 

Please, refer to this article to check for high ping or losses on your route. 

If you see any packet loss, or high ping value - report to our Support Team, we will check the issue.