A server administrator is troubleshooting a connectivity issue where a local application server can no longer communicate with a remote partner's API at api.partner.com. The administrator confirms that DNS resolution for the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) is working correctly, but a ping to the FQDN times out. The server can still access other external resources without issue. Which of the following commands would be the MOST effective next step to identify the point of failure along the network path to the partner's API?
The correct answer is to use traceroute api.partner.com. The traceroute (or tracert on Windows) command is a network diagnostic tool used to track the pathway taken by a packet on its way to a destination. It shows each router (hop) it passes through and the time it takes to respond. Since a standard ping already fails, traceroute is the most effective next step to determine exactly where along the path the connection is being dropped or timing out.
ping -t api.partner.com would simply run a continuous ping, which would also time out, providing no new information about the failure point. nslookup api.partner.com is redundant because the scenario states that DNS resolution is already confirmed to be working. netstat -r displays the local machine's routing table, which is useful for local network issues but does not trace the entire path to a remote destination across the internet.