A traceroute from your own machine only shows one path: yours. When a site is slow or unreachable, that is rarely enough to know who to blame. The fault can be in your access network, in a transit provider halfway across the world, or at the destination itself, and each case calls for a different person to call.
The classic answer is to rent a small server in another region, install mtr, and compare. TraceMapper does that for you: pick a location, run the trace, and read the result in seconds, with the same hop table and map as your local trace.
Compare the path from two networks
Run the trace from your own connection first, then from a location on another network in the same country. If the second path is clean and yours degrades at the second or third hop, the problem is in your access network. If both degrade at the same distant hop, it is not your ISP.
Check a route between two cloud providers
To see how traffic flows from one provider to another, choose a probe hosted near the first provider's region and trace toward an address of the second. You see which networks carry the traffic, where it crosses from one to the other, and how much latency each segment adds, without opening an account with either provider.
Find where a path starts to degrade
Latency grows with distance, so a jump is only meaningful if it persists on every following hop. Loss on a single intermediate hop is often a router that deprioritises probes; loss that starts at a hop and continues to the destination is real. Tracing from several locations shows whether that hop is common to all paths or specific to one.
Reading two traces side by side
A teaching example, not a real measurement. From Paris, a trace to an online game server shows 180 ms and 20 % loss from hop 7 onward, inside a transit network. The same trace from Frankfurt takes another transit and reaches the server at 22 ms with no loss. The server is fine and so is the Paris access network: the problem is the transit chosen for Paris, which is useful to tell the game host, with both traces attached.
What you get for free, and beyond
With a free account you can run one trace a day from any location. When you are chasing a problem, the 7-day Pass (EUR 4.99, one payment, nothing renews) unlocks every location, unlimited traces and the exports. To have a route re-traced automatically and be emailed when it degrades, Pro adds monitoring and alerts.
Frequently asked questions
- Do I need to rent a server in another country to test a route?
- No. TraceMapper runs the trace from its own servers or from measurement probes in more than 30 countries, and shows you the full path with latency, loss and operator for each hop.
- How do I know if a slowdown comes from my ISP?
- Trace the same destination from your connection and from another network in your country. If only your path degrades, and early in the path, your ISP is the likely cause; if every path degrades at the same distant hop, it is not.
- How much does tracing from several countries cost?
- One trace a day from any location is free with an account. The 7-day Pass costs EUR 4.99, with no subscription, and removes the limit for a week.