How do I run a traceroute?

Traceroute helps you analyze the path packets take on a network, along with any associated delays. 

You can run a traceroute on the most popular operating systems.

Overview

Traceroute is a network diagnostic tool that displays the route taken by packets across a network and measures

any transit delays. Most operating systems support the traceroute command.

If you are experiencing connectivity issues with your Cloudflare-proxied website and plan to ask for assistance, Cloudflare Support frequently asks customers for the output of a traceroute.

See the instructions for running traceroute on different operating systems below. 

If you activated your website through a hosting partner, you should traceroute to www.example.com (or another subdomain that is being proxied through Cloudflare).

Run traceroute with different platform:

• Run traceroute on Windows
• Run traceroute on Linux
• Run traceroute on Mac OS

Run traceroute on Windows

1. Open the Start menu.
2. Click Run.
3. To open the command line interface, type cmd and then click OK.
4. At the command line prompt, type:
   For IPv4 -

   > tracert example.com

   For IPv6 -

   > tracert -6 example.com

5. Press Enter.
6. You can copy the results to save to a file or paste in another program.

Run traceroute on Linux

1. Open a terminal window.
2. At the command line prompt, type:
   For IPv4 -

   > traceroute example.com

   For IPv6 -

   > traceroute -6 example.com

3. You can copy the results to save to a file or paste in another program.

Run traceroute on Mac OS

1. Search for the Network Utility application and open it.
2. Click the Traceroute tab.
3. Type the domain or IP address in the appropriate input field and press Trace.
4. You can copy the results to save to a file or paste in another program.      

Alternatively, you can follow the same instructions for running a traceroute on Linux (shown above) using the

Mac OS terminal program, but for IPv6 use the command:

> traceroute6 example.com