Whether you are troubleshooting network problems or just trying to save bandwidth, it's helpful to watch your Mac's network usage over time. Con Activity Monitor, Apple makes it easy to monitor network activity at a glance in the Dock. Here's how to set it up.
First, abra “Activity monitor”. If you are not sure how to do it, you can do it quickly with Spotlight. Press Command + Space or click the “forget” in the menu bar and a search bar will appear. Scribe “activity monitor” and press Enter.
Next, right-click the icon at the bottom of the activity monitor. In the menu that appears, click on “Dock icon”, later select “Show network usage”.
Once selected “Show network usage”, the icon at the bottom of the Activity Monitor will transform into an animated screen graphing network activity over time, updating from right to left.
(By default, this chart is updated every 5 seconds. If you want to change the rate at which the graph is updated, visit View> Refresh Rate in the menu bar at the top of the screen).
Under the default settings, network usage dock graph shows “packets per second” in blue and “packets per second” in red. These are raw counts of data packets received and sent from your Mac.
If you prefer a different reading, you can make the chart show the sent and received data in bytes. First, click on the Activity Monitor main window (press Command + 1 to appear if it is not open yet) and select the tab “Red”.
Look for the little graphic at the bottom of the window. Click on the header that says “packages” and change it to “Data” with the small drop-down menu.
Once selected “Data”, the Dock chart will change immediately. Now, the “data read per second” are represented in blue and the “bytes of data written per second” are represented in red.
When you have the Dock icon set up the way you want, feel free to close the main Activity Monitor window by pressing the red button “X”.
With the main window closed, Activity Monitor will run silently while you perform other tasks on your Mac, and the network usage graph in the Dock will continue to update. If you close Activity Monitor, the Dock icon will return to normal.
If you want the Activity Monitor icon to return to normal while it is still running, right-click the Activity Monitor Dock icon again and select “Dock icon”> “Show the app icon”.
When it's over, it doesn't hurt to dig a little deeper into Activity Monitor and explore your other options. You will see that he has many useful tricks up his sleeve..
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