Instastats

Instastats is intended to provide you with system usage data, including CPU, RAM, disk, network and battery.

Additionally, it offers to optimize your system’s free memory. The application is extremely light and unobtrusive; in fact, most of the times you will not even know it is there. In this regard, it runs from the Menu Bar and, only if you want to, it can be available in the notification center as well.

Instastats uses beautiful graphs that conveniently show statistics about the different parameters. Thus, you can get reports of processor usage, which include type of processor, number of cores as well as current tasks and threads. Likewise, you can know how much of the CPU activity is the result of user and system processes. Unfortunately, unlike other tools, it seems not to be able to monitor CPU temp, let alone issue alerts when a given threshold is reached.

In the case of your RAM memory, the application shows system memory data in categories like wired, active, inactive, used and free. Moreover, in case the available free memory is too low, the app can automatically clean it to increase your system’s performance.

Similarly, you can get a report of disk usage for each of the mounted volumes. Again, you can use this feature to know how much of your disks is still available. And, if you want to take any action, it gives you a list of the 64 files occupying most of the storage space. It is very convenient that, if you click on a block, this action will take you directly to that specific file in Finder.

There is also the possibility of knowing about the traffic that is being generated on your network. In this respect, there are two separate gauges for upload and download rates respectively. Besides, there is a graphic that show the behavior of these parameters as a time graph. This way, you can know when the peak rates happened.

Finally, as to battery usage, the tool shows various parameters, including current capacity, health status, number of charging cycles, current temperature, charging status, available time and charging time. Regrettably, unlike other similar tools, it does not allow managing different battery usage plans.

In general, Instastats offers an excellent way to monitor various system usage statistics from a single application. Regrettably, except in the case of memory, it limits itself to showing info while giving no chance to fix a possible issue. Good news is that this product is free to download from the Mac Store.