Traceroute Tree Online is a free, online tool for those who are curious about how networks are connected and what they look like. Using traceroute is one of the easiest ways to see how you are connected to another computer on the internet. Repeating this traceroute process to many different destinations gives you lots of information about what are common routes to particular destinations but it is hard to visualize where the common routes are when it is just lists of hops. This is where Traceroute Tree Online can help. You submit all of your traceroute logs and it will build up a graph showing which routers are connected. Common routes will be condensed down to a single line. In this way you can easily visualize which are key routes when going to certain groups of destinations and it gives you a glimpse into how interconnected the internet is.

Using Traceroute Tree Online is pretty simple. Just run several traceroutes (only Windows tracert is supported for now) and paste all of them into the form one after another. Submit the form and wait a few seconds while the graph is being made. Each submission is given a random number which you can use to refer to your graph at a later time.

If you are worried about me or someone else learning about your network structure then you should obfuscate your traceroutes before submitting them or just not use this service. Personally I don't think you lose anything by submitting this information but the choice is of course yours. I also offer an alternative for those who have moderate experience with Linux called trtree. It allows you to perform the traceroutes and generate the graphs all on your own computer. I will be retaining the raw traceroutes indefinitely and monitoring them to make sure the parser is working correctly. The generated graphs will also be retained indefinitely and made available for anyone to view. I also plan to combine everyone's traceroutes periodically to make larger, multi-source graphs which will paint a more accurate picture of how interconnected the internet is. So if you submit obfuscated traceroutes I ask that the first line of your submission be the text "#Obfuscated#". That way I can leave it out of any aggregate data.

If you have questions, comments, or feedback of any sort I'd like to hear from you. Visit my contact page

The parser for Traceroute Tree Online tries to be as accepting as possible. The following is an example submission. The lines highlighted in bold are the only ones the parser is looking for. All other lines can be left out for compactness. If you run up against the submission limit then your first way to trim things down is to delete the unchecked lines. You can see the graph produced by this rather simple input at 809679361. You will notice some lines wrap around to the next line because the command prompt only shows 80 characters across. You don't need to manually fix this because the parser will look for and correct it.

Tracing route to isb-7606-1.ge1-1.cns.vt.edu [192.70.187.198]
over a maximum of 30 hops:


  1     1 ms    11 ms     1 ms  192.168.3.1
  2     2 ms     2 ms     2 ms  cas-6509-1.vl219.cns.vt.edu [198.82.100.1]
  3     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  isb-6509-1.vl701.cns.vt.edu [128.173.0.9]
  4     4 ms     1 ms     5 ms  isb-6509-2.po51.cns.vt.edu [128.173.0.5]
  5     3 ms     2 ms     2 ms  isb-7606-1.ge1-1.cns.vt.edu [192.70.187.198]


Trace complete.

Tracing route to trillinux.org [208.113.228.112]
over a maximum of 30 hops:


  1     2 ms     1 ms     1 ms  192.168.3.1
  2     2 ms     3 ms     2 ms  cas-6509-1.vl219.cns.vt.edu [198.82.100.1]
  3    30 ms     4 ms     2 ms  isb-6509-1.vl701.cns.vt.edu [128.173.0.9]
  4     5 ms     1 ms     1 ms  isb-6509-2.po51.cns.vt.edu [128.173.0.5]
  5     5 ms     2 ms     4 ms  isb-7606-2.ge1-1.cns.vt.edu [192.70.187.218]
  6     9 ms     9 ms    10 ms  192.70.187.10
  7    95 ms    95 ms    95 ms  te2-1--580.tr01-asbnva01.transitrail.net [137.16
4.131.177]
  8    10 ms    18 ms    20 ms  66.79.151.133
  9    12 ms    10 ms    18 ms  cr1-cr2.wdc005.internap.net [66.79.146.201]
 10    84 ms    73 ms    73 ms  cr1.lax009.inappnet-4.cr1.wdc005.internap.net [6
6.79.146.142]
 11    93 ms   203 ms   201 ms  core1.lax.inappnet-12.cr1.lax009.internap.net [6
6.79.149.130]
 12    74 ms    73 ms    74 ms  border1.po2-bbnet2.ext1a.lax.pnap.net [216.52.25
5.95]
 13    78 ms    78 ms    75 ms  newdream-1.border1.ext1a.lax.pnap.net [216.52.22
0.78]
 14    78 ms    76 ms    78 ms  ip-66-33-201-66.dreamhost.com [66.33.201.66]
 15    75 ms    75 ms    75 ms  apache2-argon.dinero.dreamhost.com [208.113.228.
112]


Trace complete.