Monitoring network usage of individual applications?

Question

I want to monitor each application's network/internet usage on my Mac.

Sort of like how Activity Indicator shows total upload/download usage -- but I also want to know particular application usages.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

Another app I've used is RubbertNet. Also not free, but has a free trial available.

Answer 2

The app Little Snitch can do this. Among many other things, it shows traffic by app.

It costs $29, but there is a free trial available.

Answer 3

A combination of

HandsOff! and SurplusMeter

is my current solution. HandsOff is an advanced firewall which similar to LittleSnitch. It's not free, but a trial version is available. Surplusmeter on the other hand is free and open source.

Among the features which you need for monitoring network usage are:

• monitoring network activity of every process (HandsOff!)
• get the network usage of individual processes (HandsOff!)
• log total network usage (SurplusMeter)

HandOff does only display the network usage since boot. It does not log the data which is why I need SurplusMeter. However, SurplusMeter only logs the total network usage for all applications.

Answer 4

You could look at WireShark. It may have a daunting interface, but once you learn it, you can track traffic by port.

You can also check out the built-in terminal utilities NetStat, TCPDump and PCap.

Using netstat -t -u will display the send and receive queue by process name.

Answer 5

If you are using iOS 5+ you can use the remote virtual interface

$ # First get the current list of interfaces.

$ ifconfig -l

lo0 gif0 stf0 en0 en1 p2p0 fw0 ppp0 utun0

$ # Then run the tool with the UDID of the device.

$ rvictl -s 74bd53c647548234ddcef0ee3abee616005051ed



Starting device 74bd53c647548234ddcef0ee3abee616005051ed [SUCCEEDED]



$ # Get the list of interfaces again, and you can see the new virtual

$ # network interface, rvi0, added by the previous command.

$ ifconfig -l

lo0 gif0 stf0 en0 en1 p2p0 fw0 ppp0 utun0 rvi0

You should be able to use wireshark or tcpdump, or ngrep on the problem, via the mac.

EDIT: ipfw is deprecated, but you can just turn on logging and see which packets go where. I don't know how to do that with pf :(

EDIT: I don't know why I thought this was for iOS. Apologies