This week’s tip of the week is Trippy.

Ever had an app or service suddenly feel slow and wondered whether it was the app, your network, or something in between?

I’m definitely not a network expert, but Trippy makes getting some clues pretty approachable.

It combines ping and traceroute into a live terminal UI that shows the stops between your computer and a server, along with things like latency and packet loss.

Trippy has installation options for Linux, macOS, Windows, and BSD. Depending on your setup, you'll also need to configure the required privileges before running it.

Once installed, point it at a host. Let’s see what the route to GitHub looks like:

trip -u github.com

Trippy continuously measures the route, so let it run for a bit and you’ll start getting useful data.

Say the first several stops are hovering around 20ms, but farther along the route that suddenly jumps to 180ms and stays high.

That’s a useful clue. The slowdown might be somewhere along the network path rather than the service you’re trying to reach.

I work on an identity-aware proxy for a living, so being able to answer “is this actually the proxy, or is the network having a bad day?” is pretty handy.

One caveat: don’t assume packet loss at a single stop means you’ve found the culprit. Some routers deprioritize this kind of diagnostic traffic. If the loss doesn’t continue through the following stops, it might not be a problem at all.

There’s plenty more you can dig into, but you don’t need to be a network guru to start getting useful information from Trippy.

If you’ve ever reached for ping while debugging something, give Trippy a try.

That’s it! Short and sweet. Until the next one!