$ traceroute
Online Traceroute
Free, no signup. Runs from our distributed probes — see how your host looks from different parts of the world.
What is a traceroute?
Traceroute maps every router (hop) between a probe and your host by sending packets with increasing time-to-live values. It answers where your traffic actually goes — and where it slows down or dies.
A traceroute from one machine shows one path. Running it from several regions at once shows how the internet reaches you from different directions, which is where routing problems hide.
How to read the results
- Each line is a hop: the router's hostname or IP plus round-trip times. Latency should grow gradually along the path.
- A sharp jump at one hop that persists on every hop after it points at congestion or a long link at that point in the route.
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* * *means a router chose not to answer probes. That alone is common and harmless — only worry if everything after it also stops responding.
Questions
FAQ
Why do I see stars (* * *) in the output?
Many routers deprioritize or block traceroute probes while forwarding real traffic normally. Stars at a middle hop with healthy hops after it are cosmetic, not a fault.
Why is the path different from each region?
Routing is decided network by network. Each probe's provider peers differently, so the same destination is reached through different intermediate networks.
Traceroute vs MTR — which should I use?
Traceroute shows the path once. MTR repeats the measurement continuously and adds per-hop loss statistics, which is what you want to prove where packets are being dropped.