Traceroute
Visualize the path packets take to reach a destination.
About Traceroute
What is Traceroute?
Traceroute is a network diagnostic tool that maps the path packets take from your device to a destination host. It identifies each intermediate router (hop) along the route and measures the round-trip time to each one. This reveals where latency occurs and helps identify network bottlenecks, routing issues, and connectivity problems.
Why We Built This Tool
When a service is slow or unreachable, ping tells you there is a problem, but traceroute tells you where the problem is. This web-based traceroute eliminates the need for terminal access and provides an accessible way to diagnose routing issues, ISP problems, and geographic latency from any browser.
How to Use It
Enter a hostname or IP address and click Start. The tool traces the path to the destination, showing each hop's number, hostname/IP, and latency. Hops with high latency indicate potential bottlenecks. Hops showing asterisks (*) indicate routers that do not respond to trace requests, which is common for security reasons.
Reading Traceroute Results
Each line represents one hop (router) on the path. The hop number shows the distance from your device. The hostname and IP identify the router. The latency shows round-trip time. A sudden jump in latency between two hops indicates a slow link. Consistent high latency from a certain hop onward suggests congestion at that point.
Common Use Cases
Diagnosing slow application performance by identifying which network segment adds latency, verifying that traffic routes through expected networks and geographic regions, detecting ISP routing issues, troubleshooting VPN tunnel performance, comparing routes from different locations, and investigating packet loss between specific hops.