Traceroute
Articles, guides, and in-depth tips for the Traceroute — everything you need to get the most out of it.
✦ AI-powered — understands natural language
Reading Traceroute Like a Network Engineer — Internet Exchange Points, BGP Hot Potato, and Why CDNs Make 150ms Feel Like 15ms
Traceroute Reveals Internet Topology — How to Read Autonomous Systems, IXPs, and Network Boundaries in Your Results
Traceroute doesn't just show latency — it reveals internet topology: which Autonomous Systems your traffic crosses, where it hits an Internet Exchange Point and stays local, and where it traverses a transit provider and potentially crosses continents. Here's how to read ASN changes as network boundary crossings, what IXPs like LINX and AMS-IX do for routing efficiency, and why traceroute RTT values are cumulative (explaining why hop 3 can show lower latency than hop 2).
Traceroute Only Shows One Direction — and ECMP Means That Direction Changes Between Runs
Traceroute shows the path your packets take to a destination — but the return path is completely different and invisible, and even the forward path can vary between consecutive traceroutes due to ECMP load balancing. Here's how TTL-based probe discovery works, why ECMP makes each probe potentially follow a different path through multi-path networks, how Paris traceroute solves this, and why "* * *" in the middle of a traceroute usually isn't a problem.
Beyond a Single Traceroute: MTR, Asymmetric Routing, and Diagnosing Intermittent Network Issues
A single traceroute that "looks fine" doesn't rule out intermittent problems — and the path it shows is only the outbound direction, while routing is frequently asymmetric. Here's how MTR's continuous measurement reveals intermittent loss that single snapshots miss, why a hop showing loss often isn't "the problem" (ICMP rate-limiting), and how to localize issues to your network, the path, or the destination.
BGP: How Internet Routing Works — and Why Route Leaks Can Take Down Major Services
BGP is the protocol that routes traffic across the internet's 80,000 autonomous systems — and its trust model is why a misconfiguration at a small ISP took down Cloudflare, Amazon, and Facebook for two hours. Here's how BGP works, how anycast CDNs use it, and why RPKI is the partial fix.
How to Read a Traceroute: What the Output Actually Tells You
A single high-latency traceroute hop usually isn't a problem. Asterisks don't mean the hop is down. Here's how to read traceroute output, identify where latency is actually introduced, and distinguish ICMP rate limiting from real network issues.
Traceroute Tool — Map the Network Path to Any Host & Find Latency
Learn how traceroute works, how to read hop-by-hop latency results, what * * * means, how to identify congested hops, and how to use a free online traceroute tool for network diagnostics.
