Create Your Own Windows Bandwidth Monitor
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Windows XP has a performance monitoring snap-in which allows you to monitor every aspect of your computer or server’s performance. I’ll show you how to setup a simple bandwidth monitoring graph.
The speed I have at home is rather sluggish (512kbps download and 256kbps upload), your graph scale will differ more than likely.
Here’s the end-result:
Windows Bandwidth Monitoring
After all is said and done, you’ll have a graph like above (with some minor differences) that you can launch any time you need to determine how much bandwidth you’re utilizing at any given time!
As explained, I have 512kbps down and 256kbps upload (512kbps/256kbps) which is roughly 64KB down and 32KB upload when converted from bits to bytes.
You’ll want to scale your graph according to your maximum bandwidth plus a little more in case you have bursting ability through your ISP. I chose 96KB maximum which is 768kb in bits.
1) Decide if you want to monitor all your interfaces if you have multiple interfaces or just one interface.
2) Determine if you want to monitor inbound and outbound traffice on each interface also.
Once you determine that, start Performance Monitor by going to Start -> Run and typing: perfmon then clicking OK.
When first started you’ll be presented with this screen:
Default Performance Monitor
This is going to quickly change. First, let’s get rid of some of the content we don’t need. Click on “View” then choose “Customize…” and uncheck everything like the below screenshot then click “OK”:
Customize View
The resulting window should look like this (with differing spikes…):
Customized View Results
Now, we’ll change the counters.
Right-click anywhere on the graph and select “Properties”
You’ll have three counters listed, you can remove all three by clicking the “Remove” button for each one.
Default Counters
Now, we’ll add our interface counters. Click the “Add…” button. In the “Performance Object” drop-down, select “Network Interface“. Your screen may differ than mine as I have a few network adapters and some virtual network adapters.
Performance Object
After selecting network interface as the performance object, we need to specify the counter data we want.
I selected a single interface on the right under the “Select interface from list:” option. On the left under “Select counters from list:” I chose both “Bytes Sent/sec” and “Bytes Received/s“. Note: Hold CTRL key down to select both items.
Select Counters and Interface
Once you have selected them, click the “Add” button and finally click “Close” button and you’ll return to your list of counters.
New Counter List
Click on the “Scale” drop-down menu and choose “0.001“.
Change Scale to 0.001
Do this for each counter. Once you change the first counter, click on the second counter and select “0.001″ in the “Scale” drop-down.
Next, click on the “Graph” tab. Give the graph a title such as “Bandwidth“, and make the Vertical axis “Kbytes/s“. In the “Scale” text box, change it to a little over your maximum bandwidth from your provider. For example, if you have 3mbps (megabits per second) this would be 384KB and add another 32KB so 416KB. So you would enter 416. I have 512kbps (64KBps) so I added another 32KB to make it 96KB total.
Customize Graph
If you have trouble figuring out the conversions, you can find out quickly by going to http://www.matisse.net/bitcalc/ to get an idea. Remember, the “Scale” box MUST BE IN “KB” (KILOBYTES) in this example I’m showing you. Once you’re done entering the information, click “OK“.
The end result is you should have a nice little graph for bandwidth monitoring!
Final Graph
Save this graph so you can easily access it next time and you don’t have to do this configuration all over again. Simply go to “File” -> “Save as” and choose a location to save it. If you’re prompted about compatibility with newer versions/older versions of windows click “Yes“.
Now whenever you want to quickly find out how much bandwidth you are utilizing on your network interface(s) you can double-click on this performance graph you just created!
TIP: You can customize the colors of the lines, 3D effects, background colors, fonts and font sizes. Have fun playing around.
