Traceroute Tester

Understanding Global Traceroute Measurements

The Traceroute Tester on this page helps you visualize how packets travel from different vantage points on the internet to your target service. While a classic ping shows only the latency to the final destination, a traceroute exposes every intermediate hop, revealing routers, transit providers, and possible bottlenecks along the path.

How Traceroute Works Behind the Scenes

A traceroute operates by sending multiple packets toward a destination with gradually increasing time to live values, also known as hop limits. For each packet, routers decrement the hop limit by one and drop the packet when it reaches zero, sending an ICMP Time Exceeded message back to the source. By starting at one and increasing the hop limit step by step, the tool discovers each router along the route in order.

If the maximum number of hops is \( H_{\max} \) and the tool sends one probe per hop, the theoretical upper bound on the number of packets for a single traceroute is \[ N_{\text{packets}} = H_{\max} \] In practice, tools often send multiple probes per hop to obtain more stable timing information. If \( q \) probes are sent per hop, the total becomes \[ N_{\text{packets}} = H_{\max} \times q \] The Traceroute Tester uses Global traceroute probes internally, so you can inspect these hops from different continents without having to maintain your own remote servers.

Reading the Traceroute Table and Identifying Problems

Each row in the results table of this calculator represents a combination of probe location and hop number. The Probe Location column tells you where the measurement originated, while the Hop, Hostname, and IP Address columns identify each device along the path. The field that marks whether a hop is the final destination lets you see exactly where the path terminates from each vantage point.

Unknown entries typically appear as hops with a hostname value of UNKNOWN or an empty IP address. This can happen when routers are configured not to respond to diagnostic traffic or when intermediate firewalls drop the probes. A small number of unknown hops is common, but a long stretch of unknown hops in the middle of the path can indicate aggressive filtering or an opaque transit segment. Conceptually, if the total number of hops is \( H \) and the number of unknown hops is \( U \), the unknown ratio is \[ R_{\text{unknown}} = \frac{U}{H} \] Higher values of \( R_{\text{unknown}} \) make it harder to pinpoint exactly where latency or loss occurs, so those cases deserve extra investigation.

Why Run Traceroute from Multiple Global Locations

Routing decisions on the internet are heavily influenced by geography, peering agreements, and internal backbone policies. The path from Europe to your service may differ completely from the path taken from Asia or North America. By using a distributed platform of probes, the Traceroute Tester lets you compare the shape of routes from multiple continents in a single view.

For example, if the hop count from Europe to your application is \( H_{\text{EU}} \) and the hop count from North America is \( H_{\text{NA}} \), a large difference between \( H_{\text{EU}} \) and \( H_{\text{NA}} \) may signal asymmetric paths or additional transit providers being used in one region. Over time, watching how these hop counts and endpoints change can reveal new peering relationships, backbone upgrades, or misconfigurations that impact user experience. Combining this traceroute view with latency and packet loss metrics from ping measurements gives a powerful toolkit for end-to-end network diagnostics.