PingTrace

PingTrace User Guide

PingTrace runs ping and traceroute side by side against the same target. In one window you see whether the host replies and how quickly, each router along the way, the share of probes every router drops and the network that operates it – and, with continuous (MTR) mode switched on, how the path holds up over minutes rather than seconds. This guide explains every command, result column and setting in PingTrace 3.0.

Contents

1. Getting started in four steps
2. The main window and toolbar
3. Columns of the ping list
4. Columns of the traceroute list
5. Watching a route over time (MTR)
6. How to interpret what you see
7. Finding out who owns an address
8. Checking TCP ports
9. The Settings dialog
10. Saving and printing results
11. Menus, tray icon and keys
12. Requirements and licensing

1. Getting started in four steps

1. In the Enter Host Name, URL or IPv4 / IPv6 Address box, type what you want to test: a name like example.com, a web address like https://www.example.com/page, an IPv4 address like 8.8.8.8 or an IPv6 address like 2001:4860:4860::8888. When you give it a URL, PingTrace keeps just the host part.
2. Hit Enter or press Start. Pinging and route tracing begin together. If you need only one of the two, press Ping or Trace instead.
3. To force a protocol, press IPv4 or IPv6. The Start, Ping and Trace buttons follow the address family selected in Settings, which is Automatic unless you change it.
4. Results fill the lists live, row by row. Esc or Stop halts everything; to end just one job, use Action > Stop Ping or Stop Traceroute.

2. The main window and toolbar

Below the toolbar and address box, the window is split in two: ping results on the left, the traced route on the right. Drag the divider to give either side more room. The divider position, the window size and every column width are remembered between sessions.

The status bar is divided into three areas. The first sums up the latest ping (packets sent, received and lost, plus the minimum, maximum and average time), the second sums up the latest trace, and the third links to the Ashkon Software website.

Toolbar buttons

3. Columns of the ping list

Every row stands for a single echo request. Unless you change it, PingTrace sends 20 of them at one-second intervals.

4. Columns of the traceroute list

One row per hop (router) along the path, with the destination itself as the final row. Each hop gets 3 probes by default.

Hops with private or CGNAT addresses have no public ownership records, so the ASN-related columns remain blank for them. In either list, clicking a column header sorts by that column, and numeric columns sort by value rather than as text.

5. Watching a route over time (MTR)

One pass of traceroute fires only a handful of probes at each hop, which makes brief spells of loss or delay easy to overlook. Continuous mode repeats the trace over and over and folds every pass into cumulative per-hop statistics – the same idea as the mtr utility on Linux and macOS.

• Switch it on from Action > Continuous Traceroute (MTR), or make it the default on the Traceroute page of Settings with Trace continuously and keep running per-hop statistics.
• Cycles is the number of passes; enter 0 to keep going until you press Stop. Interval between cycles is the wait between passes, 1000 ms by default.
• Sent and Loss include the probes from every pass. Last holds the newest reply, while Min, Avg, Max and StDev are computed from all replies. The Latency sparkline covers the 64 most recent probes.
• Leave it running for several minutes while the trouble is actually happening – say, a choppy video call or a lagging game – and then find the earliest hop where loss or jitter appears and carries on all the way to the destination.

6. How to interpret what you see

• A hop showing “Request timed out”, * in the RTT columns and 100% loss simply did not answer in time. Plenty of routers drop or throttle traceroute probes while still passing ordinary traffic, so one quiet hop partway along the path is rarely a concern.
• Genuine trouble looks like loss or added delay that persists on every later hop through to the destination. Focus on the hop where it first shows up.
• If only one intermediate hop shows loss and the destination shows 0%, that router is just limiting how often it answers – your traffic is not being lost.
• For the destination itself, trust the ping list: steady ping replies mean the host is reachable, regardless of what the hops in between report.
• A big RTT step between two hops in different cities or countries is expected; it reflects the physical distance covered. Look at the AS Name and Remote Host columns to spot where your provider passes traffic on to another network.
• A host that never answers ping may be blocking ICMP, either itself or through a firewall. Run a TCP port check to find out whether its services are running.

What the colors mean

Out of the box, latency is shown green up to 50 ms, yellow up to 100 ms, orange up to 200 ms, red up to 400 ms and dark red beyond that. Loss is green under 1%, yellow from 1%, orange from 5% and red from 20%. You can adjust these limits on the Colors page of Settings.

7. Finding out who owns an address

Right-click any row in either list and pick Whois / IP Info.... The IP Info window then lists:

• the IP address with its reverse DNS name, AS number and AS organization;
• the address’s RDAP registration record – network name and handle, address range and CIDR, country, organization, abuse e-mail and other contacts, plus the registration and last-changed dates.

Copy puts the report on the clipboard; View RDAP Record shows the original record in your browser. Keep in mind that opening this window sends the address to rdap.org and to the registry responsible for it, and to Team Cymru for the AS lookup. The right-click menu also offers Copy IP Address.

8. Checking TCP ports

Since many servers and firewalls refuse ping, silence to ping does not prove a host is down. Open Action > TCP Port Check..., or right-click a row and choose TCP Port Check... to test that particular address.

Press Check. PingTrace opens a TCP connection to each port and reports one of four outcomes:

• Alongside the result you get the connect time, the minimum and maximum time, how many attempts were answered, and the IANA service name and description for every port.
• Service names are taken from the IANA port registry, which PingTrace fetches from iana.org and renews every 30 days; Update from IANA fetches it immediately. Until the first download, a built-in list of common ports fills in.
• Copy places the results on the clipboard as tab-separated text.

9. The Settings dialog

Open it from the Settings toolbar button, or jump straight to a page through the Settings menu. Next to each option, in parentheses, is the matching switch of the Windows ping or tracert command. Defaults puts the current page back to its original values. Your settings are stored and carried over when you upgrade from an older PingTrace version.

Ping

Traceroute

List Columns

Pick which of the 9 ping columns and 17 traceroute columns are visible. Hiding the ones you don’t need keeps the lists readable on small screens. Columns you hide are also left out of exports and printouts.

Colors

Enable or disable coloring, set the latency limits in milliseconds for green, yellow, orange and red, and set the packet-loss limits in percent for yellow, orange and red. In the traceroute list the colors apply to Last, Min, Avg and Max RTT, Loss and the Latency sparkline; in the ping list they apply to Reply in ms and the latency bar.

10. Saving and printing results

• Use Export on the toolbar, the File menu, or Export This List... from a list’s right-click menu. You can save the ping list, the traceroute list, or both in a single file.
• Pick CSV (comma-separated, opens in Excel) or tab-separated text. The proposed file name follows the pattern PingTrace-<list>-<host>-<date>.csv.
• In a combined export, each section begins with the host and the test date and time, then the ping statistics – a convenient file to attach when you open a ticket with your Internet or hosting provider.
• To print, press Print or choose File > Print Ping List or Print Traceroute List.
• Clear List on the right-click menu empties a list.

11. Menus, tray icon and keys

• Flush DNS Cache empties the Windows DNS resolver cache, forcing a fresh lookup of a host name whose address has just changed.
• Minimizing PingTrace sends it to the notification area (system tray). From the tray icon’s right-click menu you can launch a ping or trace, or pick Show to restore the window.
• Enter or F5 starts ping and traceroute; Esc stops them.

12. Requirements and licensing

PingTrace runs on Windows 7, 8, 8.1, 10 and 11 (32-bit and 64-bit) with IPv4 or IPv6 connectivity. Testing over IPv6 needs an IPv6 Internet connection, and the Whois / IP Info window, ASN lookups and IANA service names require Internet access.

PingTrace is shareware with a free 30-day trial. To keep using it after that, buy a license for $19.95 – choose Help > Register Now! in the program or use the Buy now button on this page. Each license covers one person or one workstation.