What is a Traceroute?

Legacy versions of RouteThis may have Traceroutes visible, however this article is maintained to serve as a primer on what a Traceroute is.

Traceroutes show the "path" between servers that information will travel from the customer's home to a specified address. In the above below we see a traceroute result from a customer's router (192.168.1.1) to Google.com (172.217.2.174). 

Traceroutes are read top down, so for the example above we see 5 different traceroutes being run (each column of times):

Each row is a server's IP address, one "stop" on the way to the final destination for our data. So in this case, stop 6 was at 206.108.34.6 and it took 7ms (milliseconds) to reach that point and hear back from the server.

Typically, support agents that use RouteThis do not look at Traceroutes in their debugging, but Network Operations (NOC) teams might use this information. What they are typically looking for are increasing times in the traceroute (indicating possible infrastructure issues) or for "route issues", meaning the information could not find a path to the specified server. This would look something like this:

And means a customer's device cannot reach the specified server. This can be due to infrastructure problems or something as simple as a firewall inside the customer's network.