NetBalancer is an Internet traffic monitoring and controlling software that is available as a free and professional version. The professional version is available for free today only at the Giveaway of the Day website; Hence the review.

The NetBalancer website describes the differences between the free and professional version of the traffic shaping and monitoring software this way:

*The Free version is limited to a maximum of 5 process priorities/limits and 5 rules at a time, has no separate network adapters management and no support for Network Grouping

NetBalancer’s core features include:

• Set custom upload and download speeds for individual system processes.
• Set download and upload priorities
• Manage both limits and priorities for individual network adapters
• Group local network computers and balance their traffic
• Global traffic limits
• Display all connections and traffic for all system processes

Installation of the software should not pose a problem. Users who install the Giveaway of the Day version should however take note of the optional Software Informer installation at the end which is not needed for NetBalancer’s functionality.

When you start the program for the first time you will see a list of all processes that are currently running on the system along with their process id, incoming and outgoing traffic, cpu, path and traffic history.

Each process can be selected to see additional information about it and all of its existing connections.

A right-click on any process in the listing displays a context menu with options to modify that processes’ upload and download priority. Depending on that priority, the process gets more or less of the network capacities in high load situations.

Say you want to make sure that you can play your favorite online game just fine while at the same time downloading files via Bittorrent or ftp. You could set the priority of the game process to high to make sure that it gets enough capacities to keep the game playable even if another process is requesting most of the available bandwidth.

Rules are a powerful way of prioritizing traffic further. They can be used to change priorities or download and upload limits for a process permanently or for specific days or times.

You could use rules to reduce the priority of P2P traffic during Workdays and hours for instance.

The program options can be used to customize the program further, for instance by configuring at which percentage the network balancing kicks in, by giving automatic high priority to focused applications or by editing the level severity which sets the speed differences between applications with different network priorities.

The free version of the traffic shaping software NetBalancer is available from the developer website as well.

Information about the software programs are directly taken from the process list and the data is stored in text files. This means that system administrators who want to analyse the traffic need to either do it manually or use a software program to do that.

The Internet logger does not provide any options which is a bit unfortunate because of the following reasons. The first reason is that there is no way of filtering applications that should not be logged by the application, the second that the logs can grow quickly. The Internet monitoring logs are saved in text files which grow depending on the traffic of the software applications. It can happen that the log file of a heavy traffic application (like utorrent or another bittorrent application) grows to a few hundred Megabytes after less than an hour. That’s obviously problematic if the Internet monitoring software has been configured to run all day long.

SoftX Internet Logger is a free Internet monitoring software that is available at the developer’s website.