In 1988, five years after the creation of "ping," Van Jacobson decided to modify the TTL field on the ping and use a backdoor (get an error response from a router by sending a 0 TTL packet) to create tracert. Where ping tests connectivity, tracert determines the problematic node (router).

Here is an example of a tracert session on a windows 2000 server to one of my favorite web sites, About North Georgia

C:\>tracert ngeorgia.com

Tracing route to ngeorgia.com [66.40.224.56]
over a maximum of 30 hops:

Using tracert

Don't run it while another process also trying to use tcp/ip from your machine. The results will be conflicted.

Look for something along these lines:

it signifies one of two issues: Either there is a serious network problem at this node, or the node is not configured to respond correctly to the 0 TTL sent to determine the node's characteristics.

Speed it up!

Want a quick look at the route information? Use the -d switch and tracert will not lookup the DNS for the node (you can do this with nslookup if you need information, or rerun tracert without the -d switch to find the offending node/server/router)