How to perform a traceroute on Windows

Introduction

Below we have described how you can perform a traceroute on the major Operating Systems. Please make sure that you follow the steps in the support article.

Traceroute is a network diagnostic tool that displays the route taken by packets across a network. It shows the route from network A to network B and how long it takes before it reaches the destination. If your experiencing any connectivity issues with one of your servers we can ask you for the output of a traceroute.

Prerequisites

We’re assuming you’re running on Windows, and have access to the command prompt. Traceroute comes preinstalled, and there’s no special permission needed to run a trace.

Step 1 – Open A Command Prompt

Click on the start menu, then click on run. In the prompt that opens up, type “cmd” and press OK.

Step 2 – Run a Trace

To see your route, you just run tracert with the url. For example, to trace to example.com you’d do

tracert example.com

Additionally, if you’d like to force IPv6 mode, you can use  the -6 flag:

tracert -6 example.com