Visual Traceroute for Macpro

$ traceroute example.com

What it’s for

Visual Traceroute runs a traceroute and puts every hop it can place on a map, so you can see the route your traffic takes across cities and countries, and where the long stretches are.

Use it when

• A server is slow and you suspect your traffic takes a detour.
• You want to see which countries your connection passes through.
• You need a picture of the route for a report.

Reading the result

Enter a host and click Trace. The Route list shows each hop with its address, location and reply time, and the map draws the path between the hops it could place, coloured by reply time. Select a hop to find it on the map.

Locations come from the hop’s IP address, which says where the address is registered, not exactly where the router stands. Treat them as approximate. When a location can’t be true for the reply time (a router “in Sydney” that answers a Mac in London in 5 ms), the hop is marked Location unlikely for this RTT.

What you might see

• Hops without a pin. Private addresses, like your router’s, and silent hops have no location.
• A sudden jump in reply time where the line crosses an ocean. That is distance, not a fault.
• A route that goes far away and comes back. Traffic is often routed through a big exchange point first, even to a server nearby.

Options worth knowing

• When the trace finishes, the map zooms to fit the whole route.
• Right-click a hop to copy its details, or open it in Ping, Whois or GeoIP.
• Export the hops as text or CSV, or Export Map Image… for a picture of the map.

Each public hop is looked up with a location service, and the map comes from Apple Maps. See Permissions & Privacy.

Related

• Traceroute, the same route as a table.
• GeoIP, for one address in detail.
• Hops and TTL.