This tutorial describes how you can use the traceroute and ping utilities on Linux, Mac, and Windows operating systems to test host reachability.
For example, if you are experiencing connectivity issues with a website you are hosting with us or with a Cloudflare-proxied website, our support team or the Cloudflare Support team may ask you for the output of a traceroute.
The traceroute utility determines the route that a network packet travels from your local machine to reach the target destination.
Traceroute can help identify incorrect routing table definitions or firewalls that may be blocking network traffic.
You can also use it when downloading and there are multiple mirrors available for the same piece of data you want to download to trace each mirror and get a good idea of which mirror would be the fastest to use.
Microsoft Windows® uses the tracert command to run the traceroute utility.
It is important to point out that these commands will only work if the host firewall you are pinging or route-tracing, is configured to allow such information.
Traceroute
macOS or Linux
$ traceroute example.com
Traceroute is also graphically accessible in macOS within the Network Utilities suite.
- Type "cmd + spacebar" to search for the Network Utility application and open it.
- Click the Traceroute tab.
- Type the domain or IP address in the appropriate input field and press Trace.
- You can copy the results to save to a file or paste in another program.
Windows
To run the tracert utility on a Microsoft Windows server, perform the following steps:
- From the Windows Start menu, enter cmd in the Search text box.
- Double-click Command Prompt in the list that displays. The Windows command prompt will appear.
- Run the tracert example.com command, where example.com represents the target host to test.
Ping
The ping command allows you to test the latency between your local machine and the target IP address by measuring the round-trip time for messages sent from the originating host to a destination computer that is echoed back to the source.
macOS or Linux
$ ping example.com
Windows
To run the ping utility on a Microsoft Windows server, perform the following steps:
- From the Windows Start menu, enter cmd in the Search text box.
- Double-click Command Prompt in the list that appears.
- Run the ping example.com command, where example.com represents the target host to test.
