Route trace
A ping tells you that a host has gone slow; a route trace tells you where, by listing every router on the way with its own latency and history.
Running a trace
Right-click a host and choose Trace Route, or click Route in the toolbar and pick a host or type any address in the box at the top. Hops appear as they are found, and the trace keeps measuring each of them. Retrace starts again from scratch, which shows whether the path has changed.
An asterisk (*) stands for a router that did not answer, and the hostname column fills in as reverse DNS resolves.
Reading the results
- Latency climbing gradually hop by hop is normal, more so over long distances.
- A sudden jump at one hop that every later hop inherits points to a congested or slow link there.
- A jump at one hop that later hops do not share is usually a router slow to answer pings itself, not a problem on the path.
- An asterisk in the middle usually means a router set not to answer probes.
- A trace that stops short of the destination points to a firewall blocking ICMP rather than a fault.
- A path that differs between traces is load balancing at work.
A host you rely on has gone sluggish. Trace the route: if latency is fine through the first few hops (your network and your ISP) and jumps only further along, the slowdown is out on the wider internet, not on your side – and the screen shows your ISP the exact hop where it starts.