Traceroute

In computing, traceroute is a computer network diagnostic tool for displaying the route (path) and measuring transit delays of packets across an (IP) network. The history of the route is recorded as the round-trip times of the packets received from each successive host (remote node) in the route (path); the sum of the mean times in each hop is a measure of the total time spent to establish the connection. Traceroute proceeds unless all (three) sent packets are lost more than twice, then the connection is lost and the route cannot be evaluated. Ping, on the other hand, only computes the final round-trip times from the destination point.

The command traceroute is available on many modern operating systems. On Apple macOS, it is available by opening the menu Network Utilities and selecting Traceroute, as well as from the command line interface in a terminal. On other Unix systems, such as FreeBSD or Linux, it is also available as a command line tool. On Microsoft Windows, it is named tracert. Windows NT-based operating systems also provide PathPing, with similar functionality. For Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) the tool sometimes has the name traceroute6 or tracert6.

In Linux, traceroute by default sends a sequence of (UDP) packets addressed to a destination host; ICMP Echo Request or TCP SYN packets can also be used. In Windows, traceroute sends ICMP echo requests instead of UDP packets. The time-to-live (TTL) value, also known as hop limit, is used in determining the intermediate routers being traversed towards the destination. Routers decrement TTL values of packets by one when routing and discard packets whose TTL value has reached zero, returning the ICMP error message ICMP Time Exceeded. Common default values for the initial TTL are 128 (Windows OS) and 64 (Unix-based OS).

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