MenuMeters 1.1.1
Have you ever wondered what is going on ‘behind the scenes’ in your computer? I have, and I tried a number of different system monitoring utilities to do so. I found that are many such utilities out there that give you a window to the inner workings of you computer but most of them take up just enough screen real estate that it becomes impractical to keep them running for more than a few minutes at a time while you are working. Constantly switching to and from apps is annoying, to say the least.
But then I found MenuMeters, and it did everything that I wanted in a way that I liked.
MenuMeters solves the space issue by running as a Menu Extra. It monitors four areas of your computer: CPU load, disk usage, memory usage and network throughput. Each one of these functions is it’s own menu extra and in addition to being activated or deactivated independently, they can be re-arranged in the menu bar independently.
On top of all this, each menu extra can be clicked on to reveal a menu containing even more detailed information about what it is monitoring.
Functionality
The CPU monitor can monitor CPU load as a total value or break it down by system and user values. The information can then be displayed as a percentage, a graph, a “thermometer” or any combination of the three. The CPU monitor menu contains some helpful information such as processor type, model, speed and temperature, uptime, tasks/threads and load averages. You can also launch Process Viewer and Console from the menu.
The disk usage monitor displays all disk activity to local disks on your system. While it doesn’t display information about mounted network drives, it does display FireWire and USB disks and will add and remove those drives as they are connected and disconnected. The disk usage menu displays more detailed information about each disk. Selecting a volume from the menu can either open the volume or unmount/eject it. Disk activity is displayed as either a set of up/down arrows or a set of lights.
The memory monitor displays how much RAM is currently in use and how much RAM is currently available. This information can be displayed as a numerical value, a pie chart or a thermometer. There is also a history graph option that charts your memory usage over time. The memory monitor menu gives you memory pages information, virtual memory statistics and swap file information.
The network monitor can display your network throughput as numerical value, a set of up/down arrows, a graph or any combination of the three. The graph and arrow displays are both scaled using a user defined scaling calculation (linear, square root, cube root or logarithmic) and can be scaled based on link speed or peak traffic. The network monitor menu displays more detailed information about the different active network interfaces including the IP address and traffic totals. Network Utility and Network Preferences can launched from the menu as well.
Conclusion
What I really like about MenuMeters is that because it sits up and out of the way in the menu bar it is never obscures or is obscured by any other open applications. A quick glance up and you can know all you ever wanted to know about your computer (and probably a bit more). Also, because each of the monitors can be used independently of the others you never get more than you want (the only one I keep active all of the time is the network monitor).
All in all MenuMeters is a great utility, and it gets a 9 out of 10
Price and Requirements
MenuMeters is freeware, and requires Mac OS X 10.2 or later.
Yes, fantastic application developed by a great guy.
Check out SideTrack, too.
Herad about this great little utility on the MAC OBSERVERS GEEK GUIDE
podcast – thought I’d try it.