DiagnosticsEdge resolution

Traceroute

Map the exact path and router hops packets take across the internet.

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Route Path Hop Tracer

Enter an IP or domain to discover intermediate routers and measure latency at each hop along the path.

Technical specification & engineering details

What this tool does

Runs a real traceroute from our server to the destination you specify, revealing every router hop along the path and the latency at each one — useful for isolating exactly where a routing problem or latency spike is occurring, rather than just knowing the destination overall is slow or unreachable.

How it works

Traceroute sends probes with incrementing TTL (time-to-live) values. Each router along the path decrements the TTL and, when it hits zero, replies with a time-exceeded message — revealing itself as one hop, before the probe continues one hop further on the next attempt. The result is a hop-by-hop map of the actual path your traffic takes.

A note on availability

This depends on the underlying hosting environment supporting the trace — if it's not available in the current environment, the tool says so plainly rather than showing incomplete or fabricated data.

When you'd use this

Isolating whether a latency problem is happening on your own network, your ISP's, a transit provider's, or the destination's — each hop's latency jump tells you where in the path the slowdown actually occurs.

Frequently asked questions

Why does the traceroute stop before reaching the destination?

Many routers and firewalls block or deprioritize the ICMP/UDP probes traceroute relies on, showing '* * *' timeouts even when the actual path to the destination is working fine — it's a common false alarm, not proof of an outage.

Why do some hops show a latency spike and then drop back down?

Routers often rate-limit or deprioritize their own ICMP responses below normal traffic-forwarding priority. A slow or timed-out hop mid-path doesn't necessarily mean real congestion there — check whether the hops after it are still fast.

Does traceroute show the path traffic takes back to me?

No — it only shows the outbound path to the destination. The return path can take a completely different route due to asymmetric routing, which traceroute alone can't reveal.