A technician suspects a company's border firewall is down, thus blocking Internet access. The technician executes the following commands: #ping -c 1 firewall.company.com 64 bytes from firewall.company

tcpdump captures raw packet traffic on a network interface for analysis but does not probe routing paths or identify where packets are being dropped in the network.

nmap scans hosts and open ports; it does not trace routing hops or identify where along a network path connectivity is lost.

dig performs DNS lookups to resolve hostnames to IP addresses; it does not trace network paths or reveal routing failures between hops.

traceroute sends probe packets with incrementally increasing TTL values, recording each router along the path until the destination or failure point is reached. Since ping confirmed the firewall responds at 192.168.1.1, traceroute reveals exactly which downstream hop - such as an ISP gateway - is failing. This makes it the best tool to pinpoint the source of the outage.