While troubleshooting intermittent audio drop-outs on an internal VoIP call, your initial ping to the SIP gateway averages 8 ms RTT with no loss. Packet captures, however, reveal more than 35 ms of delay variation. You suspect an intermediate router is buffering traffic and need a command-line utility that will continuously probe the destination and update a table showing loss, latency, and jitter for every hop so you can see where the variation starts. Which tool available in most Linux distributions fits this requirement?
mtr (My Traceroute) merges the functions of traceroute and ping and can display additional per-hop statistics, including current, average and worst jitter when the J, M or X fields are selected with the -o option. This makes it ideal for locating where delay variation begins on a multi-hop path. Standard traceroute shows only round-trip times for a small sample of probes, not jitter. iperf3 does calculate jitter, but only end-to-end (and only in UDP mode), so it cannot reveal which hop introduces the variation. A plain ping (even with the -D timestamp option) measures one host at a time and offers no per-hop insight.
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CompTIA Linux+ XK0-006 (V8)
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