How can I use MTR to diagnose network issues?

MTR is a tool that combines the functions of ping and traceroute. It can show you both the path that packets take from your computer to reach another computer, and also the packet loss and ping statistics for each of the intermediate "hops". Here is an example of using MTR between the Sail Internet core network and Google's DNS service (8.8.8.8):

[gginis@wxyz ~]$ mtr 8.8.8.8

The output of running this command for approximately 2 minutes is shown below:

                                                          My traceroute  [v0.85]

wxyz.sailx.co (0.0.0.0)                                                                                          Fri Mar  8 01:00:43 2019
                                                                                                  Packets               Pings
 Host                                                                                           Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. abcde.sailx.co                                                                               0.0%   142    0.5   1.1   0.4  10.8   2.5
 2. core-he2-rtr2.sailx.co                                                                       0.0%   142    0.6   1.5   0.5  10.8   2.8
 3. g0-0-0-p88.core-sjc-rtr1.sailx.co                                                            0.0%   141    1.1   1.8   0.9  10.9   2.7
 4. bgp-sjc-rtr2.sailx.co                                                                        0.0%   141    1.0   1.7   0.9  11.8   2.3
 5. google.as15169.any2ix.coresite.com                                                           0.0%   141    7.7   8.3   7.4  30.8   2.4
 6. 108.170.247.225                                                                              0.0%   141    7.7   8.0   7.5  10.9   0.8
 7. 108.170.237.155                                                                              0.0%   141    7.8   8.1   7.6  15.8   1.0
 8. google-public-dns-a.google.com                                                               0.0%   141    7.6   7.8   7.2  16.8   1.2

The MTR output shows the routers or hosts that a packet follows from your computer to the destination address. The example output above shows that 8 "hops" are needed to reach the destination from this specific source. For each hop, the output shows the packet loss, the number of packets sent, the round-trip time of the last response, the average round-trip time, the best round-trip time, the worst round-trip time, and the standard deviation of the round-trip time. 

MTR can be used to detect if there is packet loss or excessive round-trip time between your computer and one of the intermediate routers or hosts.