Most network problems are noticed by users before they are noticed by the people who could fix them. A route to a payment provider starts dropping packets at night, a transit change adds 40 ms to your main market, and the first signal is a support ticket the next morning.
Route monitoring closes that gap: TraceMapper re-runs a traceroute toward each destination you care about on a fixed schedule, keeps every result, and emails you when a run crosses a threshold you set.
Measured at the destination, not on the way
Latency and loss alerts read the last hop, the destination itself. Routers along the path often answer traceroute probes slowly or not at all because they give them low priority; counting those as problems would page you for nothing. Each monitor run sends 10 probes per hop, so a loss figure is a measurement, not a guess.
Route changes without the noise
Real paths change IP addresses on almost every run because of load balancing, so comparing addresses would alert constantly. TraceMapper compares the sequence of networks (AS) instead, learns the paths it sees over the last 24 hours, and alerts only when a new path holds for 3 runs in a row. The email shows the usual path and the new one.
When a destination goes silent
If a run gets no answer at all, it is recorded as a failed run and evaluated as 100 % loss, so a dead destination triggers your packet loss alert. If our measurement network cannot run a check, the run is marked as not measured and never counted as a failure.
A typical setup
A teaching example. An online shop monitors its payment provider's API and its CDN from Frankfurt every 15 minutes, with an alert at 20 % loss and another at 150 ms. At 02:10 the payment route starts losing 30 % at the destination; the alert email arrives with the value and the threshold, and the Results tab shows the exact run where it began.
Plans
Pro includes 10 monitored routes and 20 alerts, with runs every 15 minutes at the shortest, and starts with 7 free days (card required, nothing charged if you cancel before). Business covers a team of 5 with 50 routes, 100 alerts and runs every 5 minutes, shared by every member.
Frequently asked questions
- How often can a route be checked?
- From every 15 minutes to once a day on Pro, and down to every 5 minutes on Business. Each run is a full traceroute with 10 probes per hop.
- What triggers an alert?
- Packet loss or latency above the threshold you set, measured at the destination, or a change in the sequence of networks the traffic crosses that holds for 3 consecutive runs. Alerts are sent by email, at most once an hour per alert.
- Can my team share the monitors?
- Yes, on the Business plan: monitors created by any member are visible to and manageable by the whole team, and count against a shared quota of 50.