The Windows version of traceroute. Tracks the route a packet goes from your machine to the destination machine. Helps in troubleshooting bottleneck problems. pathping is an alternative to tracert
Command
tracert <url or ip>
Process
Tracert abuses TTL error messages. Several packets are sent out with increasing TTL hops. For the router that corresponds to the TTL hop, the router will respond with their IP address.
- Send a TTL=1 packet
- TTL Exceeded. Error message is sent back from the router. Within this error message includes the router’s IP address.
- Send TTL=2 packet and receive the IP of router 2
- Continue sending increasing TTL packets until there are no more error messages.
