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Introduction

PingPlotter is a utility for tracing IP packets through a network. It graphically illustrates the route that a request takes, and the IP address of each server along the route. PingPlotter was born out of need by it's author. He needed to find out why his broadband Internet connection was so erratic. Sometimes it was really fast, other times it was slow to the the point of being unusable and he had to use a dial-up. What he needed was a good way to prove the performance (or lack of performance) of his connection to his Internet service provider.

Not only is PingPlotter a graphical trace route program, but it's also a whole lot more. PingPlotter uses the multithreading capabilities of Windows to check performance on all hops in the route at the same time. This has several advantages: 1) It's a lot faster. 2) All hops are tested at the same time, instead of seconds apart, so the comparison is better.

Another thing you can do with PingPlotter is set it to continuously trace one destination. What it will then do is test the same route over and over again (forever if you want). That way you can watch the performance over a period of time, without having to rerun the trace over and over again.

The graphing capabilities is where PingPlotter really shines. Being able to see where problems are visually is invaluable. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words (or if you're used to using the command line tracert...a whole bunch of text).

Take a look at this graph. Look at the jump between hops seven and eight. There's a problem there, and it's easy to tell by looking at the graph.

As one satisfied customer wrote once, "HMOs should reimburse for prescribing PingPlotter to Internet-intense patients as a prophylactic against ulcers".