CertiGuide to Network+  9  Chapter 0101:  TCP/IP       9  XI  TCP/IP Network Diagnostic Utilities

PING 1 XII  Network Monitoring Protocols

Tracert is short for trace route that displays the path that data must be sent to a successful location. Like ping, it also communicates using the ICMP protocol. Very useful, not only, for determining a stopping point on a pathway (if a program hangs while trying to access a network site) but also for determining slow links within your environment. To use TRACERT, type TRACERT and the IP address or friendly name of the path or route you want to see, at the Command Prompt. Notice that there will be a maximum of 30 hops displayed to the destination. In networking parlance, a hop is an intermediate destination encountered by a packet along the way to its final destination.

Each router through which the packet passes is considered a hop. In general, the fewer the number of hops, the faster a packet gets to its destination. Since some routes are faster than others, sometimes a route with 6 hops could be faster than a route with 1 (for example, a dialup connection directly into the destination computer), but hop count can still be useful as a basic yardstick of network speed in many cases.

PING 1 XII  Network Monitoring Protocols