This tutorial will guide you in installing, setting up and using AnalogX Netstat Live (which is free) to monitor your Internet usage (uploads and downloads). As a number of ISP’s are now disconnecting customers for using “too much” bandwidth (this one in particular), knowing exactly how much you’ve downloaded (or uploaded) in a given month can be very helpful. Note: the OS X version of this tutorial can be found here.
- Download and install AnalogX Netstat Live. The installation is very straight forward - you’ll mostly just click ‘next’ and ‘ok’ a few times. Launch it by clicking Start -> All Programs -> AnalogX -> Netstat Live -> Netstat Live.
- Right-click anywhere in the Analog X Netstat Live window. Select Configure from the pop-up window
- By default a number of the features are disabled. Click the Disabled button for the following items: Auto Minimize, Auto Start and Close Minimizes. Each one should now be set to Enabled.
- By enabling these features, Analog X Netstat Live will launch each time Windows starts up, but automatically minimize to your System Tray. Also, if you open it from the tray (to check and see what your usage currently is) you can click the X button and it won’t actually close Netstat Live, rather it will be minimized back to your System Tray. This is important as Netstat Live must always be running, otherwise your uploads/downloads won’t be accurately tracked.
- You can also disable some of the ‘other’ things that NetStat Live monitors. Right-click in the main window, select Statistics and review the items that are monitored. You will very likely want to keep Local Machine, Incoming Data, Incoming Totals, Outgoing Data and Outgoing Totals enabled. The Remote Machine, System Threads and CPU Usage can all be disabled.
- Now you can track your Internet bandwidth (upload and downloads) usage. The current monthly total is displayed, along with the previous monthly total and “total since your last reboot”.
- If you live in a multiple-computer household, all sharing the same Internet connection, make sure to install AnalogX Netstat Live on each PC (running Windows) so that you can total them up to get your ‘true’ upload and download stats.
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if you seriously want to monitor your household bandwidth including any wireless devices, network connected devices (aka TiVo, net radios, etc) you’re going to be better off using a solution like Smoothwall on an old PC to act as a gateway to the internet. Here it’ll monitor ALL of your bandwidth… On top of monitoring bandwidth usage, you can initiate QoS to ensure voice and real time data isn’t clobbered by P2P. You can also use the web proxy to save yourself a few megabytes in traffic too.
This is a neat one pc solution, but if you have a busy household and a lot of devices on your network - this doesn’t scale.
spiral -
You’re absolutely correct, and have given me a great idea for another tutorial - thanks!
Ross
Tomato firmware does a great job of this if you have a router that supports it
http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato/
You can see real time graphs + daily, weekly and monthly totals
atconc -
Hey thanks for yet another tutorial idea
As it happens I have a WRT54G (well, it’s my roommates but I don’t think he’ll care what I do with it as long as he can still connect to the Internet). Cheers!
It’s cool that posts like this lead to helpful comment discussion such as what spiral and atonic said. Awesome article. Looking forward to the one explaining some options over the whole network
Ronald -
I totally agree, it’s fantastic when folks leave comments that lead to things for me to write about. In large part because that way I KNOW people will be interested, rather than have to ‘guess’. Sadly the one about network monitoring won’t work w/ the version of the Linksys wrt54g that I have (or I should say, my roommate has) - but I *think* I might have an old wrt54 somewhere in my closet. Gotta go dig around. I will for sure be doing the one on Smoothwall though, but it’ll take a bit of time as it looks a bit detailed (and I have to install a 2nd NIC in my linux PC).
It would be nice to be able to tell the difference between different connections, for instance, if this is run on a laptop, you can track the free connection at the university separate from the home connection, etc.
I use ShaPlus Bandwidth meter available at http://www.shaplus.com/bandwidth-meter/ How it is different from other bandwidth meters is it shows a simple interface with current, today and monthly bandwidth.
i was wondering along the same lines if there is a program that can monitor individual program usage and be able to ban certain programs from using the net and give other programs more allowance.
just use a free alternative to monitor your bandwidth usage which is “NET METER”, been using it for a year now…
thanks.
This program wont work for me. does it work on vista? when i double click it, nothing happens but it is running in the background (as told by my task manager). I’ll try “NET METER”.
how to reboot the program?
eg> My new internet plan start from 11th of Oct.
so, need to reboot on the date to start new.
@sejong:
Unfortunately, I don’t think you can (with this program). I did try one out for OS X that let you define which day the month started on, but this app doesn’t appear to let you do that.
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