The program uses the freely available WinPcap which provides access to the network traffic information. The program itself displays two different types of information in its interface. The Interface Traffic tab displays the overall bandwidth of a specific network interface or all network interfaces of the computer the software is running on. Process Traffic on the other hand offers a list of detailed process specific information.

The traffic monitor records traffic from all interfaces and connections by default. Users can enter different bandwidth thresholds and update intervals after they hit the stop button to pause the logging of traffic on the system. The program warns the user visually if the bandwidth threshold is exceeded.

Probably more useful than the overall bandwidth utilization are the information of the process traffic tab. Here you see a list of all running processes on the system with information like their process name and ID, local port as well as memory and cpu usage. Free Process Traffic Monitor furthermore lists the current send and received rate in Kbps for each process. There is unfortunately no option to access the overall traffic utilization of a process over time, as all information are displayed and updated in realtime.

That’s without doubt the biggest weakness of Free Process Traffic Monitor, and definitely inferior to monitoring software like Netlimiter, which despite it’s “lite” state offers those information.

Another missing feature is the ability to configure notifications, alarms and automatic commands like killing a process if it uses up more bandwidth than configured in the application. A third missing option is a filter to only display specific processes and not all of them. The display changes a lot at the default refresh interval of 10 seconds.

Windows users can use Free Process Traffic Monitor for two purposes. First, they can check the overall bandwidth utilization of the system, and second they can use it to check up on a specific process. Both only in realtime.

Windows users can download the free traffic monitor from the developer website. They also need to download and install WinPcap before they can use the software. (via)

Moo0 ConnectionWatcher is another program that can display a detailed list of those programs. The application is available as a portable program and installer, and will display all open connections on startup.

The interface looks similar to the file monitoring application by the same developer which I reviewed yesterday.

Each connection is listed in its own line, with detailed information about the protocol, process id, process name, local and remote port and data that has been received.

A right-click on any entry opens a context menu with options to close or kill the process, locate the program on the computer’s hard drive, disconnect the connection or open the program’s properties.

The status bar displays statistics about the number of open connections, the protocol, and the data that is currently received and sent.

Besides the option to display the current connections, it is possible to view a log with past connections as well. All connections are sorted by date and time, with options to save the log to the local computer system for future reference.

The connections in the current and log view mode can be sorted by all columns, for instance by application name, port number or bytes received.

The View menu at the top can again be used to change the update frequency of the data and the number of log entries that the program stores at the same time.

Moo0 ConnectionWatcher is a handy program to monitor Internet and network connections. It is not as lightweight as CurrPorts though, and could use advanced features like filtering, alerts and notifications, references and web searches.

The program is compatible with recent 32-bit and 64-bit Windows operating systems. It was tested on Windows 7 Professional 64-bit.

You can adjust the transparency level of the output window or move Netmeter into the system tray. You can also adjust the colors of the graph if you like, the default colors have a nice contrast though.

The most important feature of Netmeter is however not information about the current network traffic but the statistics that it accumulates over time. In short, it displays totals for the day, week and month as well as projected figures for the same periods.

It also displays the peak upload and download which is the maximum amount of bandwidth that your connection was capable of. This can be used to analyze the download and upload limit of your connection. Helpful if your provider sold you a 16 Mbit connection but you only get speeds of 2 Mbit. Just make sure you use to download and upload data from a server that is capable of sending data in your maximum speeds. You could alternatively just keep it running in the background to check on the stats in regular intervals.

Netmeter has an alert function that warns you when you reach a defined amount of gigabytes during a day, week or month. This is probably the best feature for users with limited bandwidth accounts making sure that you do not have to pay additional fees to your provider because you went over your bandwidth limit.

Best of all it is free to use and does not use many resources. Available only for Microsoft Windows.