Sonar Traceroutes

Sonar Traceroutes are tracking Santa as he makes his annual trek from chimney to chimney at breakneck speeds.

While you’re preparing for the jolly old man to barge into your house, take a minute to learn a little more about the power of traceroutes. These aren’t your typical traceroute functions…. these are Historical Traceroutes that provide you with both the current traceroute and past traceroutes (twice a day for each TCP or DNS check that you’ve configured). Now you can analyze your network connectivity patterns on a global scale, and more easily make actionable decisions.

Sounds like a lot of big words, but it’s actually really simple. Lets use a holiday analogy, cause everybody loves a good Christmas story.

‘Twas the night before Christmas, and dear old St. Nick is traveling from Moscow to Los Angeles to deliver presents in mere milliseconds.

In this story, Mr. Claus is the information you want to send across your network. But there’s a problem! Santa is arriving in Los Angeles later than expected.

In order to troubleshoot, you will need to be able to see how long it took for Santa to pass through each point (in this case every city) to make it to the endpoint.

Now with any old traceroute function, you can see this in less than a second. However, say you don’t see any abnormalities in resolution times between points.

You need Historical Traceroutes! Compare Santa’s 2015 trek with his 2014 and older routes. With Constellix Sonar, you can see these side-by-side and quickly see where there are bottlenecks, packet loss, or latency.

Now this Christmas eve, Santa had an unusual delay in Paris and Frankfurt where there were many bonbons and cookies with warm glasses of milk. With a normal traceroute, you wouldn’t be able to see this, because it was such a minor delay at multiple locations across Europe. But with the help of Historical Traceroutes, you were able to see an increase in resolution times across most of Europe between 2015 and the last year.

Fit to burst, Santa finally arrived in Los Angeles and completed his trek. With a wink of his eye he called,

“Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night!”

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