Traceroute

Traceroute is a network diagnostics tool developed in 1988 by Van Jacobson, with the contribution of Steve Deering, whose purpose is to verify the communication path of a computer to a particular destination host. The Internet is connected by a set of devices called gateways through which data packets travel. When a user accesses content on the Internet, this information is stored on a particular host. If the access route to this content includes a gateway with a problem, communication with this host may be compromised. The traceroute then identifies through which gateways the packets traveled to reach the destination by printing the Internet Protocol (IP) address of each hop and the response time, revealing which network points manifest problems.