Hi all,

I recently got PingPlotter to try to diagnose potential issues with my network. For this, I've been pinging 8.8.8.8. However, I'm getting loss at that end point that I can't seem to trace back to previous hops. You can see what I mean in my image. While some of the other hops have experienced minor loss, I chalked that up to just being those occasional packets that get denied. Where the packets are being lost for the final hop, there is no discernable trace backwards to see where the issue is stemming from. Is it possible that 8.8.8.8 will sometimes just deny pings as well, like any other hop in the journey?

Edit: wanted to add another image with a more zoomed out look to show that the packets being lost don't line up with the others at all. They all seem random: https://imgur.com/a/pGzQ6ui

Hey MagiPix,

Thanks for reaching out!

It is possible for packet loss to originate at any point in the route which includes the destination (final hop), which after reviewing your screenshots appears to be the case here.

Along with that because the "random" packet loss shown across the intermediate hops in your screenshot does not align with the packet loss at the final hop you can deduct that the two are not related.

The important thing to remember here is that the most important hop in the route is the final destination and that the intermediate hops are only relevant when you are not happy with the results shown. At that point is when you will want to open up intermediate hops to correlate latency/packet loss from the final destination with previous hops in the route.

That said here are some helpful articles on the topic of interpreting PingPlotter if you haven't seen them already:

Interpreting Latency and Packet Loss
Interpreting Latency or Packet Loss at Intermediate Hops
Common Network Problems

If this leaves you with any questions please let us know!

Thanks,
-TJ