Network Troubleshooting for Beginners: The Swiss Army Knives of Diagnostics

September 16, 2025

Network Troubleshooting for Beginners: The Swiss Army Knives of Diagnostics

Introduction

Up to this point, we’ve used simple utilities for specific tasks:

• ping checked connectivity,
• traceroute showed the path,
• ipconfig and arp helped with the local network,
• telnet and nc tested ports.

That’s like having a separate hammer, screwdriver, and wrench. But sometimes you need a multi-purpose tool. Today we’ll look at three such “all-in-one” tools:

• mtr — ping + traceroute on steroids,
• nmap — universal network scanner,
• curl — a command-line browser.

mtr — Real-Time Traceroute 🚀

What does it do?

Combines the features of ping and traceroute. In real time, it shows latency and packet loss percentage for each hop along the path.