If you’re like most people, you use your Mac’s Dock to access your favorite applications and files. But did you know that you can also use the Dock to monitor your network usage? In this article, we’ll show you how to do just that. First, open the “System Preferences” application on your Mac. Next, click on the “Dock” tab. Here, you will see a list of all the applications and files that are currently open in your Mac. To monitor your network usage, simply select one of these applications or files and click on the “Show Usage Details” button. This will open a new window that will show you all of the information related to this application or file. For example, if you select the “Mail” application, this window will show you how much data has been sent and received by this application over the past few minutes. Similarly, if you select a file from your hard drive, this window will show you how much disk space this file has used over the past few minutes. ..
Whether you’re troubleshooting network issues or just trying to conserve bandwidth, it’s handy to watch your Mac’s network usage over time. With Activity Monitor, Apple makes it easy to keep an eye on network activity at a glance in the Dock. Here’s how to set it up.
First, open “Activity Monitor.” If you’re not sure how, you can do it quickly using Spotlight. Press Command+Space or click the “magnifying glass” icon in your menu bar, and a search bar will appear. Type “activity monitor,” and press Return.
Next, right-click the Activity Monitor Dock icon. In the menu that appears, click “Dock Icon,” then select “Show Network Usage.”
Once “Show Network Usage” is selected, Activity Monitor’s dock icon will transform into an animated display that graphs network activity over time, updating from right to left.
(By default, this graph updates every 5 seconds. If you want to change the rate at which the graph updates, visit View > Update Frequency in the menu bar at the top of the screen.)
Under the default settings, the network usage Dock graph shows “packets in per second,” in blue and “packets out per second” in red. These are raw counts of data packets received by and sent from your Mac.
If you’d prefer a different readout, you can make the the graph show data sent and received in bytes instead. First, click the main Activity Monitor window (press Command+1 to make it appear if it isn’t already open), and select the “Network” tab.
Locate the tiny graph at the bottom of the window. Click the header that reads “Packets,” and change it to “Data” with the small drop-down menu.
Once “Data” is selected, the Dock graph will change immediately. Now “data read per second” is represented in blue, and “bytes of data written per second” is represented in red.
When you have the Dock icon configured the way you want, feel free to close the main Activity Monitor window by pressing the red “X” button.
With the main window closed, Activity Monitor will run quietly while you do 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 change back to normal.
If you want to change the Activity Monitor icon back to normal while it’s still running, right-click the Activity Monitor Dock icon again and select “Dock Icon” > “Show Application Icon.”
When you’re all done, it doesn’t hurt to poke around Activity Monitor some more and explore its other options. You’ll see that it has many useful tricks up its sleeve.
RELATED: How to Troubleshoot Your Mac With Activity Monitor
