What is Traceroute?
Traceroute is a networking tool that helps you understand the route that your IP packets take to reach the destination. Traceroute reports back which servers the packet passed through and how long each hop took. This is useful if you are troubleshooting a network or trying to determine why your connection to certain websites or IP addresses is failing or time-consuming.
In case you aren’t familiar with the way data is transmitted over the Internet, it’s important to understand that you will never have a direct connection to the webserver or computer you are communicating with.
Instead, your data is passed from one node (router or switch) to another in order to find the fastest route to an Internet backbone, before eventually reaching its final destination. This is a bit like a bucket brigade, or perhaps more like a network of highways, interstates, and local roads. While your data will very rarely take the same route twice, the path it takes and the switches it passed through are often very similar from one request to the next.