How To Do a Traceroute

Overview

Traceroute is a network diagnostic tool that displays the route taken by packets across a network and measures any transit delays. Most operating systems support the traceroute command.

See the instructions for running traceroute on different operating systems below.

Run traceroute on Windows

1. Open the Start menu.
2. Click Run.
3. To open the command line interface, type cmd and then click OK.
4. At the command line prompt, type:
   For IPv4 –
   > tracert yourdomain.com

          For IPv6 – 

Run traceroute on Linux

1. Open a terminal window.
2. At the command line prompt, type:
   For IPv4 –
   > traceroute yourdomain.com

          For IPv6 –

3. You can copy the results to save to a file or paste in another program.

Run traceroute on Mac OS

1. Search for the Network Utility application and open it.
2. Click the Traceroute tab.
3. Type the domain or IP address in the appropriate input field and press Trace.
4. You can copy the results to save to a file or paste in another program.

Alternatively, you can follow the same instructions for running a traceroute on Linux (shown above) using the Mac OS terminal program, but for IPv6 use the command: