New on the Network Tools page: a Traceroute / Ping Visualizer. Paste raw output from traceroute, Windows tracert, or ping and it turns the wall of text into something you can actually read at a glance — a per-hop latency chain or a per-packet chart, with timeouts, latency jumps, and dropped packets flagged automatically.

What It Does

It auto-detects which of the four formats you pasted — Linux/Mac traceroute, Windows tracert, Linux ping, or Windows ping — and renders the right visualization:

New on the Network Tools page: a VLAN / QinQ Tag Overhead Calculator. It exists because of the same problem that led to the MTU / Encapsulation Overhead Calculator — vendors don’t agree on what a config knob actually means, and it costs you an afternoon before you find that out.

The history behind this one

The MTU tool exists because mtu isn’t the same number on every platform. Classic Cisco IOS treats it as the L3 payload size. Junos and IOS-XR fold the 14-byte Ethernet header into it. Same command, same-looking number, two different frames on the wire — and the failure mode is never an error message, it’s just silent fragmentation or a black-holed jumbo-frame flow that only shows up under load.

MTU problems are some of the most annoying things to troubleshoot in networking, because they’re usually silent. Small packets sail through fine, everything looks healthy, and then someone complains that a specific app is slow or hanging — and it turns out one link in the path, three hops in, has an MTU 8 bytes smaller than everyone assumed. GRE, IPsec, PPPoE, a VPN overlay, a jumbo-frame config that only got applied to half the path, a VLAN tag quietly adding 4 bytes nobody accounted for, or just two vendors defining and displaying “MTU” differently (L2 vs. L3, tagged vs. untagged) — any of these can quietly clip your effective MTU, and standard ping/traceroute won’t tell you where.