Looking for help Analyzing my information

Posted by: PingTastic

Looking for help Analyzing my information - 09/02/15 11:43 AM

Good morning, good afternoon and possibly good evening all,

I'm fairly new to this software and so far I think it's pretty incredible. I have been having an issue with drops to a specific website at different times and so it was recommended by Comcast that I use Ping Plotter to test my connectivity to the site. So far users have reported a couple of instances where they have had dropped connections at the following times:

8/31 -- 8:50pm
9/1 -- 6:15pm

Now looking over the data I don't really see anything conclusive and if anything I only see packet drops across the board. I reached out to Comcast to see if this might be ISP related but they stated it was all on the website's end.

I've attached my screenshot (ScreenCapture1)
and what Comcast extracted from the data (ScreenCapture2

Comcast stated that I need to dig down into packets to see which ones are actually failing and not just missing responses but I'm not sure what that actually means. So if anyone could help me out or at least maybe clarify what he means it would be much appreciated, thank you.
Posted by: Gary

Re: Looking for help Analyzing my information - 09/02/15 01:55 PM

Hey PingTastic,

Thanks for writing in - and thanks for trying out PingPlotter!

When you say that you're seeing packet loss "across the board" - the one thing you want to look into (and what Comcast *may* be referring to when they're asking you to "dig down") is to see if the packet loss you're seeing at earlier hops in your route is actually affecting your final target. Some devices simply don't prioritize ICMP requests very high (or don't respond to them at all). We cover this topic in quite a bit more detail here, if you're interested:

http://www.pingman.com/kb/5

When you see packet loss at your final destination, you want to go back up through your route to see at which hop that pattern of packet loss starts. This is most easily accomplished by making use of PingPlotter's timeline graphs. We've got a guide that goes through some best practices and strategies for this, which you can find here:

http://www.pingplotter.com/gsg/findproblem_intro.html

We've also got a great step-by-step guide that goes over the entire process of troubleshooting a network problem using PingPlotter, which may prove helpful to you as well:

http://www.pingplotter.com/netnirvana/

It's a bit tough to try and speculate or diagnose any issues based off of the limited information we have from only your screenshots here. If you'd like, feel free to send over any .pp2 files you may have collected (in Pingplotter, "File" -> "Save Sample Set"), and we'd be happy to take a look and offer some more specific guidance from there.

Hopefully this helps to get you headed in the right direction. If you should find yourself with any questions, or needing any additional assistance - please don't hesitate to let us know!

Best wishes,

-Gary
Posted by: PingTastic

Re: Looking for help Analyzing my information - 09/02/15 04:55 PM

Gary, thank you so much for your assistance and all of the detailed information and links you provided. I will review the links and see if I can further clarify where the packet loss begins.

As the file size exceeded the upload limit I have added it to my OneDrive account for ease of access here:

http://1drv.ms/1iiMzsv

Again the trouble spot was specifically at these times:

8/31 -- 8:50pm
9/1 -- 6:15pm

Thank you again so much for all your help with this!