Pathping vs Tracert

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I'm studying for the 98-366 exam- Can some one describe the difference between Pathping and tracert ?

Hello @Daniel-Thomas ,

Pathping and Tracert are similar, both are used to test connectivity and latency. Although the latency data is not that accurate for either when traversing a public network.

Traceroute uses the TTL feature to make each successive hop in the transit path respond with an ICMP TTL Expired packet. It sends three packets, increasing the TTL by one for each hop being measured. Each probe packet indirectly measures the latency between the source and the device where the TTL is declared expired. The problem is that when measuring the latency for hop five for example, latency spikes in hop one through four can make the fifth hop look slow. Also some routing devices, could filter or throttle ICMP traffic.

Pathping does a traceroute to the destination, and then uses ICMP to ping each hop in the path 100 times. This means pathping will give more accurate latency information. But it is still subject to the same issues as traceroute. Sending a larger number of packets gives a little better representation of the latency.

Both of these tools rely on ICMP. When traversing public devices, ICMP traffic might be throttled or blocked. ISPs may be implementing Control Plane Policing. ICMP traffic may be handled differently from TCP traffic, which means the results don't really represent what latency normal traffic will see.

Hope this helps,

@Daniel-Thomas I like to think of PathPing as the love child of tracert and ping. Tracert is essentially the history of the route recorded as the round trip times of the packet displaying routing device hops along the way. Ping is an echo request that just displays the total round trip time, instead of showing each individual device time like in tracert. So, combined together as PathPing you see the cumulative round trip in addition to hop /device information and latency.
Test each one so you can see the results, first try ping:

Ping 8.8.8.8

Notice you only receive a reply from only one endpoint.
Next, run tracert

Tracert 8.8.8.8

Notice the multiple routers your packet traverses. You can see helpful info like IP addresses and latency measured in ms.
Lastly, run Pathping

Pathping 8.8.8.8

Notice hops are identified and essentially pings are sent to each router/hop.
I hope that helps.

I'm guessing it also depends on how big of a hurry you are in? Since Pathping takes a bit longer... :)

@matthew-montgomery,

the time of pathping is because of the data that is being generated at each step to give you a more complete picture of what is happening in each hop to the destination. :)

@matthew-montgomery Exactly! Why wait for all the detailed info from a PathPing if you only need to test end to end connectivity? Save the path ping for situations that require the individual hop info.