Traceroute/tracert is a networking diagnostic tool for displaying routes and transit delays of packets across an IP network.

It reports round-trip times of the packets received from each successive host. The command aborts if all packets get lost more than twice.

Traceroute sends packets and gradually increase their TTL. TTL gets subtracted at every router, so TTL is otherwise known as hop limit.

If a packet is not acknowledged in a specified interval (seconds), asterisks * are shown.