I know next to nothing about networking so apologies if this is a stupid or strange question.
Our systems administration/IT support is outsourced to a consulting company. I was working with them to try and figure out a routing issue. We have policy-based routing set up that should route any connection attempts to a certain IP range through a separate router. As I don't yet have the program that's going to be using this connection I was trying to verify it was set up correctly via tracert. The policy would sometimes correctly route it to the separate connection, with it being incorrectly routed with the catch-all internet connection policy the rest of the time.
The person I was working with from the consulting company couldn't figure it out, so he had to contact their rep at Watchguard. They determined it was caused by the default internet routing policy being ranked higher on the policy list than the specific IP range policy. When the problem continued after adjusting this, the rep went on to say that the firewall policies wouldn't be affecting any ping or tracert attempts anyways, and that any programs attempting to connect to an IP in the set range would be routed correctly.
I haven't had the chance to verify this yet with the particular application that will be using the connection. However I'm seeing some connection attempts to certain IPs randomly be routed to the separate connection when the IPs should not have triggered that policy. It seems like all of the policies are configured correctly so I would think this is a firewall issue. Does the rep's claim about firewall policies not affecting ping/tracert have any merit? I'll likely have to get in touch with them again about correcting this but I wanted to know in advance if this guy may or may not know what he's talking about.