MTR for Macpro

$ brew install mtr
$ sudo mtr -rw example.com

What it’s for

MTR combines Ping and Traceroute. It finds every router between your Mac and a host, then keeps probing all of them and keeps statistics for each one: how many probes went unanswered, and how long the answers took. Over minutes or hours, that shows where a problem starts: in your home network, at your provider, or further away.

Use it when

• Calls, games or downloads stutter now and then, and a single check finds nothing.
• You want evidence for your provider: what was lost, where, and when.
• A website is slow from your network but fine from others.

Reading the route

Enter a host and press Return. Each row is one hop, a router on the path, numbered from your Mac outwards. The last row is the host itself.

Loss% is the share of probes a hop didn’t answer, and Sent how many it was sent. Last, Avg, Best, Worst and Stdev are its reply times in milliseconds; a high Stdev means jitter. The rule to remember: only loss that continues to the last hop is real.

Reading the history

Every run is recorded, and the History tab draws it as a heatmap: hops down the side, time across, each cell coloured by how much that hop lost in that slice of time.

Above the chart MTR sums up the run in one sentence, for example that loss starts at a hop and reaches the destination, or that some hops only drop probes addressed to themselves. The outage log lists every stretch when the destination stopped answering, with its exact start and end, even in a recording that ran for days.

What you might see

• Loss from one hop all the way to the end. A real problem at that hop or the link just before it. At hop 1 or 2 it is your Wi-Fi or router; further along, your provider or beyond.
• The last hop never answers. The host blocks ping. MTR can still read the path up to it.
• High Worst and Stdev already at hop 1, on Wi-Fi. Interference or a weak signal. See Wi-Fi Analyzer.

Tip: To show your provider what happened, leave MTR running while the problem occurs, then use Export Report (PNG) or Export Outages (CSV) in the History tab.

Related

• Bufferbloat, when the delay only rises while the line is busy.
• Hops and TTL, how a path is discovered.
• The internet is slow or keeps dropping.