Tools to monitor traffic

It would seem that now is the time when the high-speed unlimited internet access is available almost everywhere, and there is no need draw their attention to the number of megabytes downloaded (rather, gigabytes), except that when it comes to mobile communication. But sometimes circumstances force to go on a business trip, and on the other hand, even on vacation, far away from civilization sometimes I want to look what's going on in the Internet, and then come to help all kinds of 3G-modem or tethering function on iPhone. It was then, traffic accounting topic becomes hot as ever. monitoring traffic on your Mac - a task which, fortunately, has many solutions.

In the case of 3G-Modem various operators, such as "MTS", "Beeline", "Megaphone", or any other, providing such a service, everything is quite simple: bundled with the driver supplied on the modem's internal memory, there is always a special tool to track traffic.

Such utilities show different statistics, such as number of downloaded and sent megabytes or packages for the last session of the day, week, month or all time to use your modem, are able to "on the fly" to build graphics. The situation becomes more interesting when there is no such utility. In this case, the first thing that we can advise the traveler, - run included with any Mac OS application "

monitoring system"(A quick way to do that - type" monitoring "in the Spotlight search). Of course, the application does not have such a rich functionality as specialized programs, but a small tab "Network" at the very bottom allows you to track the number of incoming / outgoing packets and amounts of data in the current session of the computer, and watch the tiny, but a clear graph showing the load on the network.

Something similar, but slightly more detail shows the utility iStat Menus and application SurplusMeter, which we reviewed earlier. Among other similar means for the "lung" traffic analysis can be called MenuMeters. Despite its minimalism and obvious similarities with iStat Menus, this tool, in addition to its being free, different and yet quite a lot of detailed settings.

And one more representative of the same class - Bigpond Usage MeterUtility, realized with two ways to choose from: the icon sitting in the system tray, or a widget for Dashboard.

For a more detailed and meticulously examine the information on the data passing through your computer, select the tool and more serious. One of these - net Monitor. For $ 10 per user is able to create reports in HTML, XML, and count the traffic flow between certain dates, monitor incoming and outgoing data on remote computers and traditionally display the consumption of megabytes in the form schedules.

The most advanced utility can be considered Ration. The program is not only able to show everything that usually show a means of this kind, but also the use of traffic limit you specify, can to work with plug-ins, run certain actions when specified events, work with schemes of tariff plans of different ISPs, run jump system updates only during the period of user inactivity, show statistics in graphs and Growl notifications, and more, And free. However, to take advantage of all these delights, have previously ask the developer API and write a special plug.

Perhaps our readers can share in the comments your options for tools for the analysis and accounting of traffic. One thing is clear: the choice among them is big enough to satisfy the tastes of any user, and it is always is yours.