iLoveMacApps.com

If you have a website or a large personal network in your home or organisation you will want to know where your packets and pings are going to potentially speed up the network. As well as this if you are experiencing slow downs on particular sites while surfing the web its usually a good idea to find out where the slow downs and see if there is anything you can do about.

Although you can use Traceroute in Terminal its a bit clunky and really slow. I am for ever waiting at certain points for it to complete hops. One of the best tools for the job is Path Analyzer Pro, I will be discussing its features in this post. Its a good bit of software that can be used to trace routes of network connections.

Tracing Your Connections

This app is pretty simple. You set your IP address or web address, tweak a couple of settings and watch it trace the route. The actual traceroute is very fast, one it is completed you can see a lot of information about the route taken. For example you can see a time graph so you know where it is slow along the route, the number of hops and the networks crossed. As well as this is also shows you a very good graphical model of the Geo locations of the routes. If you network connections seems slow they may be taking the long wat round.

For the more advance network users (which I fall way out of) there is extra settings which you can tweak. For example you can change the the protocol, port, packet size, time to live, as well as various other network settings. This app is for network managers to troubleshoot why a network is slow or how it wil perform. For the average user it does a bit to much and is a little too advance.

Conclusion

This app is a well rounded piece of software. It offers a good way to trace network paths. As well as this it has some advance features that many people may find useful. For the $30 asking price it may be a worth while buy. The only problem I have with this app is that it seems to simple. I don’t think you would get value for money, but I don’t know a lot about networks. As always try it out and see if it works for you.