Traceroute

The Novabench traceroute traces the network path between your device and a destination, showing every hop (router) along the way. For each hop, Novabench measures latency, packet loss, and geographic location. This helps you identify where slowdowns, packet loss, or routing inefficiencies occur in the network path.

Traceroute is useful for diagnosing connectivity issues, understanding why a specific server feels slow, verifying ISP routing decisions, and monitoring route stability over time.

How traceroute works

Traceroute sends packets with incrementally increasing TTL (time-to-live) values. Each router that handles the packet decrements the TTL by one. When the TTL reaches zero, the router sends back an error response, revealing its address and the round-trip time. By increasing the TTL from 1 upward, Novabench discovers each router along the path to the destination.

Novabench sends multiple rounds of probes to each hop, providing statistical data (min, max, average latency) rather than a single measurement.

Configuration

Targets

By default, the traceroute targets novabench.com. On Plus, you can add custom targets (up to 10) to trace routes to specific servers, game hosts, cloud regions, or any other destination. A target tree lets you select or exclude individual targets before running.

Protocol

The protocol determines how traceroute packets are sent:

If the default ICMP trace shows asterisks (unresponsive hops), try UDP or TCP to get responses from those routers.

Hops and rounds

• Max hops: the maximum number of routers to trace before stopping. Range: 1 to 128. Default: 64. Adjustable on Plus.
• Rounds: the number of probe rounds sent to each hop. Range: 1 to 10. Default: 3. More rounds produce more statistically reliable latency data.

Live view

While the traceroute runs, a live display updates in real time:

• Rounds counter: how many probe rounds have completed
• Average hop latency: running average across all discovered hops
• Max hop latency: the slowest hop discovered so far
• Packet loss: percentage of probes that received no response
• Box-plot chart: updates as each round completes, showing latency distribution per hop

Continuous mode

Each target has a play button that launches a continuous traceroute session. In continuous mode, Novabench repeatedly traces the route to that target, updating results in real time until you manually stop the session.

Continuous mode is useful for:

• Monitoring route stability during a specific time window (for example, during peak hours)
• Detecting intermittent routing changes or packet loss that a single trace might miss
• Observing how latency patterns change over extended periods

Reading your results

After the traceroute completes, the results page provides four views of the data.

Hop latency box plot

A box-and-whisker chart showing the latency distribution for each hop across all rounds. Each box shows the median, quartiles, and outliers. This view makes it easy to spot which hops have high or inconsistent latency.

A sudden latency increase at a specific hop often indicates congestion at that router or on the link between hops. If latency increases at one hop but stays elevated for all subsequent hops, the bottleneck is at the point where the increase first appears.

Heatmap

A color-coded grid with rounds on one axis and hops on the other. Each cell is colored by latency: cool colors for fast responses, warm colors for slow responses. The heatmap reveals patterns across rounds, such as a consistently slow hop or a hop that is fast in some rounds but slow in others.

Route map

A geographic visualization that plots each hop's physical location on a map, showing the path your packets take across the world. The route map uses IP geolocation data for each hop address, so accuracy depends on the geolocation database.

The route map is useful for understanding where your traffic physically travels, which can explain unexpected latency. For example, traffic between two cities in the same country might route through a different continent.

Route table

A detailed table showing every hop for every round:

• TTL: hop number in the route
• Address: IP address of the router at each hop
• Hostname: reverse DNS lookup for the address
• RTT: round-trip time for each probe round (ms)
• Geolocation/Organization : city, country, and ISP information for the hop (via IP lookup)

The route table is the most granular view and is useful for identifying specific routers or ISP handoff points that cause problems.

IP lookup (Plus)

On Plus, Novabench performs detailed IP lookups for all discovered hop addresses. Each lookup returns:

• Geographic location (city, country, coordinates)
• ISP and organization name
• ASN (Autonomous System Number)
• Reverse DNS hostname

This data powers the route map and adds context to the route table.

Feature availability by plan

Related pages

• Speed test: measure download speed, upload speed, and latency
• DNS benchmark: test DNS resolver performance
• Network tests overview: how the three network sub-tests relate and when to use each
• Scheduled tests: automate recurring traceroute runs