Sometimes it may be, for whatever reason, that your VPS does have a network connection, but that it is slow or suffers from hitches. This does not always mean that there is something wrong with your VPS, because the cause may well be in an external network. To be able to say this with certainty, we would like to see a traceroute or MTR added as well for such problems. MTR combines the latency / package-loss information of a 'ping' with the route information of a 'traceroute' and is therefore very useful for diagnostic purposes.
MTR installation
MTR is a standalone program / application and you will have to install it on your OS before you can use it.
- Linux:
Use the package manager used by your OS and install "MTR". An example for CentOS is:For Ubuntu / Debian that is:sudo yum -y install mtrsudo apt -y install mtr
- Mac OS X:
You can download a self-installer on this website. You can also install MTR via homebrew or macports via the command or "ports install mtr" for use in the OS X terminal.
- Windows:
The installer for using MTR in Windows can be found here. You can also use the default tracert from the 'Command prompt' in Windows, for example, try the command:tracert google.com
Using MTR
Perform an MTR traceroute using the command below. In this command, change IPADDRESS to the IP address or hostname you'd like to change.
mtr IPADDRESSThis provides a real-time MTR which continues until you stop it and only by pausing the MTR (press P) can you optionally select the output and then copy-paste.
A good alternative is to indicate in advance how often you want to run the MTR and to make the output immediately suitable for copy-paste actions. You can do this with the following command:
mtr --report-cycles=20 IPADDRESS
You're also welcome to change the amount of cycles from 20 to another number. The cycles determine how often you'd like MTR to run. The final result then displays the average measurements of the 20 mtr commands.
An example of the output, for example, an MTR to Google.com (mtr --report-cycles=20 google.com) is shown below:

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