Ping is used to test connectivity between two hosts, but doesn’t provide information about the details of devices between the hosts. Traceroute (tracert) is a utility generates a list of hops that were successfully reached along the path. This list can provide important verification and troubleshooting information. If the data reaches the destination, then the trace lists the interface of every router in the path between the hosts. If the data fails at some hop along the way, the address of the last router that responded to the trace can provide an indication of where the problem or security restrictions are found.
Round Trip Time (RTT)
Using traceroute provides round trip time for each hop along the path and indicates if a hop fails to respond. The round trip time is the time a packet takes to reach the remote host and for the response from the host to return. An asterisk (*) is used to indicate a lost or unreplied packet.
This information can be used to locate a problematic router in the path. If the display shows high response times or data losses from a particular hop, this is an indication that the resources of the router or its connections may be stressed.
IPv4 Time-to-Live (TTL) and IPv6 Hop Limit
Traceroute makes use of a function of the TTL field in IPv4 and the Hop Limit field in IPv6 in the Layer 3 headers, along with the ICMP time exceeded message.
Play the animation in the figure to see how Traceroute takes advantage of TTL.
The first sequence of messages sent from traceroute will have a TTL field value of 1. This causes the TTL to time out the IPv4 packet at the first router. This router then responds with an ICMPv4 message. Traceroute now has the address of the first hop.
Traceroute then progressively increments the TTL field (2, 3, 4...) for each sequence of messages. This provides the trace with the address of each hop as the packets timeout further down the path. The TTL field continues to be increased until the destination is reached or it is incremented to a predefined maximum.
Once the final destination is reached, the host responds with either an ICMP port unreachable message or an ICMP echo reply message instead of the ICMP time exceeded message.