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by klysm 499 days ago
Only misleading if you don't understand what it's doing. If you do, then it's a useful tool.
1 comments

I don’t trust the ICMP code in mtr. I’ve had an mtr to 1.1.1.1 which shows my wifi router as an intermediate hop showing 100% loss when doing pings at interval of 0.1ms. A flood ping to my router shows 0%. I’d rather just use time tested tools such as ping and trace route, which shouldn’t even be combined anyway since the loss indicator is usually unreliable unless there’s cascading loss (and even then can still be unreliable).
I tried mtr (I usually use ping and traceroute). 87% packet loss at my router and the next hop, then 0% loss. WTF I say to myself and uninstall.
Somewhere in another thread I retracted my issue with the ICMP handling code. But you've nailed my #1 gripe, the per-hop loss indicator is testing control path for diagnostic packets at each hop when the tool is meant to diagnose end to end latency and loss. How do you square a router or many routers showing packet loss when there's 0% end to end loss; it doesn't make sense, it's unintuitive, and that's how misleading inferences manifest.
Whatever the 80% lost packets on the router and next hop mean, there is either a serious problem with the tool or with my router AND the next hop.

I will go for the tool because it is the only one that warns about such a problem.