Traffic Counter

Traffic Counter is an extremely light and straightforward application you can use to monitor network traffic on your machine.

Thus, it provides useful information as to inbound and outbound Internet traffic generated by each of the processes running on your computer.

Luckily, the application does not clutter your desktop as it runs unobtrusively from the Status Bar. A simple click there shows a sort of summary of the traffic generated in and from your machine since it rebooted. Likewise, you can have more detailed information if you press the corresponding button, which shows a separate window for that purpose. This time there are two tabs, one is called Monitor and the other Statistics.

The Monitor tab shows a table organized by processes. There are other columns that display the time as well as the outgoing, incoming and total number of bytes. Regrettably, it is not possible to sort the info by clicking on the title of a column. The Statistics tab, in turn, shows similar data but it generates a report covering a specific period of time.

I feel that the tool lacks, in general, the ability to consolidate the data in reports. Moreover, it would be useful if it readily showed other relevant information such as connection speed. I know it is probably out of its scope, but do not expect it to work as a firewall to prevent specific processes from generating traffic.

All in all, Traffic Counter is a simple way to monitor Internet usage. It can detect processes that are unjustifiably generating excessive traffic, for example. It serves to keep your data traffic low if you are charged per byte. Fortunately, the product is free to use.