Gaining Context For Traceroute

Traceroute is an incredibly popular tool for analyzing network behavior, however, there are some limitations that it can encounter. There is a terrific article at IP Insider (article 1 and article 2, in German), that outlines some of the shortcomings that some admins may encounter.One of those shortcomings is that there is no historical data in the action. The command gives you a snapshot of how the flow is operating currently, but you won’t be able to compare this to any other time. If you are troubleshooting an error, you may be able to locate the source of the error, but not compare it to a known good state.

This is where opEvents can come in handy when  responding to network events. With opEvents you can have actions that are run when a network event occurs or when a network event has been remediated, this is a useful function and will help provide additional context to network events. Any extra information is invaluable when troubleshooting during the remediation process, seen below is a screenshot of how this is presented;

To set up traceroute, or any script for that matter, to run automatically is straightforward. There is a very good set of webinars below that outline how to set up opEvents and opConfig thoroughly and optimise it for any network.