When trying to pinpoint the cause of an Internet connectivity problem in Windows, most people turn to the handful of built-in utilities provided for this purpose such as ping, tracert, and nslookup. While these tools can be helpful, the insight that any one of these utilities can provide is limited, as is their ease-of-use given that they're primarily rudimentary command-line programs.
In contrast, Visualware's Visual Route 2005 Personal Edition can make identifying connectivity issues significantly faster and more convenient. It merges the capabilities of all the built-in Windows IP utilities into a single graphical utility, and also throws in automatic WHOIS and ARIN (American Registry of Internet Numbers) database lookups for good measure.
Tracing Problems
When you launch VisualRoute and type in a URL or IP address, the utility begins performing a complete trace route to the location, recording information from each hop needed to reach the destination. (VisualRoute also adds a button to Internet Explorer so when you're having problems with a particular site you can initiate a site trace without having to leave the browser.)
Each trace performed includes an analysis box outlining the number of hops needed to reach the target destination, as well as an overview of any notable network problems encountered, and as the trace is occurring, Visual Route constructs a detailed table encompassing data from each waypoint.
VisualRoute's tables can be a treasure trove of data. For each individual hop, the tables display a plethora of information, including the IP address, FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name), TTL (Time to Live), ISP name, apparent physical location, and time zone. If any packet loss is encountered at a particular hop, the percentage of data lost is reported as well, which makes it easy to see where bottlenecks or excessive latency may be occurring. (To make the table easier to read you can adjust the width of each column as well as remove columns that provide gratuitous information.)
In addition to the information shown in the table, clicking on any FQDN, ISP, or location entry will display relevant information for each from either a WHOIS or ARIN database. This will typically include name servers, ISP phone, e-mail, and postal contact info, and even the latitude and longitude of each location encountered during the trace.
To supplement the tabular data, as each hop in the trace is recorded VisualRoute also plots the journey on a world map which has pan and zoom capabilities. VisualRoute uses a physical relief map by default, but you can change that to a political map that clearly denotes national boundaries (the map automatically changes from relief to political as you zoom in). The end point of traceroute is marked with a crosshair.
By default, VisualRoute will attempt to initiate traceroutes in the customary fashion by using the ICMP protocol. However, since many sites automatically discard ICMP packets for security reasons, the utility will switch to the UDP protocol when necessary, since it typically has a better chance of traversing firewalls.
Although VisualRoute reports the location for each hop, this information isn't always accurate, though that's not necessarily the fault of the utility. The geolocation of an IP address is hardly an exact science, so VisualRoute must often make "guesses" when trying to pinpoint the physical location of a particular hop.
When in doubt, VisualRoute uses location information on file about the ISP in the ARIN database, but this can be misleading since it often reports the ISP's headquarters or offices and not necessarily a provider's actual Internet points of presence. To indicate when VisualRoute can't confirm a location, both the table entry and the map link are displayed in purple — otherwise, the location and its corresponding link are rendered in black.
