Is tracert a valid tool for determining which path to the Internet the traffic is taking?

[Madruga]

Our customer has 3 routers: 2 connected to our global MPLS cloud and 1 for Internet breakout.

An Ipanema device switches traffic to the correct router (MPLS or Internet).

The MPLS routers run BGP on the WAN and no routing protocol on the LAN. They also run HSRP to determine who is the active gateway.

Yesterday, the ISP did a maintenance on the Internet link. When the link was reactivated, the customer complained that Internet traffic was going through the primary MPLS router. He came to that conclusion by doing a tracert to google.com from his PC and verifying the first hop address.

My question is: is tracert a valid tool in this case? I believe the Ipanema redirects traffic based on the port number, and since ICMP doesn't match the Internet port set (80,443 etc.), I would think ping/tracert would go through the default gateway (MPLS) anyway. Can someone please confirm?

[shaps]

If he also does a whats my ip he will be able to detemine his IP used to breakout, it should be a simple case of correlating this against the providers.

[Richard Burts]

As I was reading the original post I was thinking that yes tracert is a valid tool for determining the path that data is taking - assuming that there is not anything that changes the routing logic based on type of traffic. Then the original post makes the point that the routing logic is altered based on the type of traffic. In this case then no tracert is not a valid tool for determining the path that HTTP will take.

HTH

Rick