The best way to see what's happening in a routing context is to watch what happens to a message at each stop along the way. The tooling provides a mechanism for dropping messages into a running routing context and tracing the path the messages take through it.
To trace messages through a routing context:
Create one or more test messages as described in Creating test messages for route tracing.
In Project Explorer, right-click the project's Camel context file to open the context menu, and select > .
![[Note]](imagesdb/note.png)
Note Do not run it as unless you have created a comprehensive JUnit test for the project.
Activate tracing for the running routing context as described in Activating route tracing.
Drag one of the test messages from Project Explorer onto the routing context's starting point in JMX Navigator .
In JMX Navigator, select the routing context being traced.
The tooling populates Messages view with message instances that represent the message at each stage in the traced context.
Diagram view displays a graphical representation of the selected routing context.
In Messages view, select one of the message instances.
Properties view displays the full details and content of the message instance.
In Diagram view, the route step corresponding to the selected message instance is highlighted. If the route step is a processing step, the tooling tags the exiting path with timing and processing metrics.
Repeat this prodedure as needed.