Path ping

What it does: like Traceroute, but it then sends a burst of pings to EACH hop and measures how much gets lost and how slow each one is. It's the best tool for "the connection is flaky/slow — where on the path is it going wrong?" Same IPv4/IPv6/Auto picker as Ping/Trace. One run feeds two views: the Hops tab (a list) and the Map tab (Pro, formerly the separate Path map tool) — the same hops drawn left-to-right as a chain from you to the destination, colored by loss (green / amber / red), with a best-effort reverse-DNS name under each address.

What you need: a destination (name or IP); it pre-fills your gateway. Nothing else to set.

Safe to run: yes — passive. It takes longer than a plain trace because it measures every hop. The Map tab adds only reverse-DNS lookups of the hop addresses, and only while you're looking at it (demo mode never looks anything up).

What to expect / reading results: one row per hop with its packet-loss % and average time. Scan down for the FIRST hop where loss or latency jumps and stays high — that's your prime suspect. One caveat: loss showing ONLY on the final hop while every hop before it is clean usually just means the destination limits how fast it answers pings, not a real problem. On the map, a hop with no name line simply has no PTR record (common on IPv6 backbone hops); IPv6 addresses are longer, so hop spacing widens to keep labels apart.