It can be useful to keep track of bandwidth and data usage so as to know how network connections are being utilized. NetWorx is a free and easy to use bandwidth monitoring tool for Windows which does that and also helps in setting quota for network utilization.
Download and install it from here. During the installation, choose “All Connections” so that readings generated by NetWorx are for total network interfaces present rather than a selected one.
Once installed, it will show up in the system tray as a bar graph icon.
To get a quick snapshot about current network bandwidth usage, right click on that icon and choose “Show Graph”
This will bring up the graph that shows total bandwidth usage across all the interfaces along with the current download and upload speeds.
To clock or test an interface’s throughput, choose “Speed Meter” and press the green button to start measuring. To stop, press the red button. This data can be saved and exported as well. (All the features of NetWorx can be accessed by a right click on it’s system tray icon).
To set quotas for data usage limits, choose ” Quota” and click “Setup”.
Enter the limits based on Daily, Weekly, Monthly or from last 24 hours. traffic type (Only downloads, only uploads, only dial-up connections or all) can be chosen as well. Volume unit can be either KB, MB or GB and “Allowance” is the data usage limit. Also, alerts can be set based on quota reaching it’s limits and automatically shutting down network interfaces once it happens.
“Usage Report” gives a general as well as detailed information about total data and bandwidth consumed during different time periods like daily, weekly, monthly, hourly or even custom time intervals. Also, the reports are available on a per user basis (for different users in Windows) and they can be exported for record keeping in the form of HTML, MS Excel and Text file.
To sum it up, NetWorx is a simple and powerful bandwidth monitoring tool for Windows which helps in analyzing and removing bottlenecks related to network activity.
[There are similar tools available for Ubuntu/Linux Mint as well, for example : nethogs and bmon ]
Happy monitoring.