How to Read a Traceroute
Each line represents one hop — one router your packets passed through on the way to the destination. The numbers are round-trip times (ms) for probes sent to that hop.
What the latency tells you
Low latency on early hops is normal — these are nearby routers. A sudden large jump (e.g. 20ms to 150ms) usually marks a transatlantic or transpacific link. If latency stays high from a certain hop onwards, that's where the bottleneck is.
Packet loss
Loss% shows what percentage of probes didn't get a response at that hop. Loss early in the route that recovers later is usually just a router deprioritising ICMP — not a real problem. Consistent loss from a hop onwards indicates a genuine issue.
traceroute vs tracert vs mtr
traceroute is Unix/Linux/macOS. tracert is Windows. mtr sends multiple probes and shows packet loss percentages per hop — more useful for diagnosing intermittent issues.