Knowing the locations of IP addresses that access your Web servers, send you e-mail or try to steal your company's confidential data can be helpful. Tracking a hacker's address to a location across town - and not North Korea - suggests which law enforcement agency to notify.

Visualware says its VisualRoute software graphically displays traceroute network path information, including destination and intermediate hop locations on a zoomable world map that tells you precisely where and how traffic is flowing between two Internet nodes. The company says its highly visual network path analysis can help network managers more easily and productively troubleshoot network connectivity problems.

VisualRoute 8.0a (the company recently released Version 8.0b) showed that the software is better than a typical command-line traceroute utility. VisualRoute graphs hop-to-hop time intervals to help identify network bottlenecks, and its Internet Control Messaging Protocol-based network path information is accurate and runs on several platforms. However, its location information was often incorrect or missing, the user interface was sluggish, its error messages were cryptic, and it has some glaring bugs. We also wished VisualRoute could integrate with our Web servers to show where site visitors were located instead of having us enter each URL or address one at a time (see "How we did it").