TrafficMenu
Monitor your Network Traffic
TrafficMenu is a menu item — an application that sits in your menu bar, next to your Airport status, date display, Spotlight, and what not. For a given network interface that you set in the preferences, it displays the corresponding value for upstream or downstream traffic, the sum of up- and downstream traffic, or the price for up- and downstream traffic. You can set the traffic cost in the preferences.
TrafficMenu 1.1 is the current version. You can download it here and read the release notes here. TrafficMenu is free as in beer and comes with no warranty whatsoever. I'm sharing it because it solved a problem for me (eyeing the cost of GPRS connections when on a train).
The traffic you see is not your current through-put, though. If you want that, you might want to take a look at the extensive MenuMeters. TrafficMenu displays the amount of bytes that have been transferred via the chosen network interface since it has been created. Some interfaces get created anew upon reboot, like en0, en1, etc. — some are being created and destroyed for each connection, e.g. the interface ppp0 that Mac OS X uses when I connect using my GPRS cell phone. When an interface is being destroyed, all the accumulated traffic is being reset. You can only select an interface in the preferences if it is currently existing.
So, which network interface do you choose? I suppose you need to try. For me, Airport is called "en1", Ethernet is "en0" — this might differ from system to system. I don't know of a way for me to translate these names into something meaningful. I just list all the interface names Mac OS X gives me.
Use the Paypal button to donate to the development of TrafficMenu. Any amount is welcome. Thank you!
Things I aim for in a future version:
- Preference option "launch at Login"
- save counted traffic / cost beyond the destruction of a network interface