Which command can display the route taken to a destination and the latency at each hop?

• A. traceroute
• B. ping
• C. mtr
• D. tracepath

Answer: (A)

Traceroute reveals the path to a destination and the time it takes for each hop along that path. It does this by sending probe packets with increasing TTL values. When a router along the way decrements the TTL to zero, it sends back an ICMP Time Exceeded message, letting you know the router’s address and the round-trip time for that hop. By listing each hop with its response time, you get both the route taken and the latency at each point along the route. This makes it the straightforward tool for diagnosing where delays or failures occur across the network path.

Ping only checks reachability and reports the round-trip time to a single host, not the route. Mtr provides a live, ongoing view of the route with per-hop statistics, which is useful for monitoring but isn’t the standard single-shot route-and-latency display. Tracepath is similar to traceroute but uses a different probing method and may behave differently in some networks.