All the network administrators know about the traceroute command available in Linux and its equivalent command tracert in Windows. These command show you the exact path of network connections taken when connecting to an external IP address. For example, when you connect to google.com in your web browsers, your computer transfer data directly to the google servers, but it takes a series of hops from one network to another to finally connect to the google servers. The traceroute command show you all the hops taken on various networks and their respective addresses when connecting to a particular IP address or website. But all this information is text based and does not really give you an idea of how far and wide your computer is connecting to open various sites.
Fortunately you can use the Visual Trace Route tool to view the traced network route drawn on the map of the world to show you how many hops are taken to which servers located in which countries in the world. The Visual Trace Route tool can trace any IP address or domain name you specify. It can perform two types of trace – host trace and the proxy trace.
The host trace traces the specified domain name or IP address starting from the YouGetSignal.com. On the other hand the proxy trace traces the specified domain name or IP address starting from your own IP address. In both cases, a map of the traced paths and the hops is shown.
Conclusion: The Visual Trace Route tool shows a real time map of a traced network path which may help you better understand how far the data transferred from your computer has to travel and how many hops take places before finally reaching the destination servers.
You can visit the Visual Trace Route tool at http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/.