The IP SLA monitor command allows you to probe up to eight hops along four different equal-cost paths to the destination host. Path monitoring is restricted to the abilities of traceroute, which uses UDP packets. IP SLA uses the traceroute program to determine the hops along the different equal-cost paths. The traceroute program runs after IP SLA creates the probe session for the destination host. When there is more than one equal-cost path to the destination, the traceroute program runs for each path sequentially. After the traceroute completes for each path, IP SLA creates probe sessions for up to eight hops along that path. Each of these probe sessions stores the round-trip-time data.