At the top of the gauge are download and upload data rates. Downloaded data is network traffic that comes to a computer, for example – downloading a file from the Internet. Uploaded data is network traffic that goes out from a computer – for example sending an email from a local POP3 client.

To the right of the gauge is a scale. This scale will automatically adjust such that the maximum value is that of the maximum value of the data rate sample taken for the duration of the time period shown.

Below this is the gauge data itself. It can be shown in several chart views. The default is shown above. This combines both data transfer directions, download and upload, into one chart.

The Power Toy by default will behave as a system tray application. When you run it you’ll see the following little widget down at the lower-right of your screen, The purple/green square icon is the G-Gauge application icon. Hovering over it will show you the last known data rates. You can exit the application either from this icon’s menu or from the File menu on the main application window. The Tools>Options menu allows you to change this and other aspects, e.g. topmost window behavior, of the application.

What are the Caveats?

This Power Toy was written quickly to demonstrate the concept and to get your feedback with regards to its usefulness. Given that I have to mention a few caveats.

Data rates and volume shown are aggregated from both your local network traffic on your LAN and your Internet traffic on the WAN going to and from your LAN. So what does this mean to you? You can’t assume the source of the traffic if you see a blip on a gauge. All this means is that data is being moved across your local network either locally to another device or remotely to the Internet.

G-Gauge takes advantage of the peer-to-peer aspect of Network Magic to provide network-wide monitoring of your network usage. This does come with a cost and that is the tool itself uses your network to transmit this information. I’ll describe data being transferred to and from a local PC over the network, both LAN and WAN, as network traffic. Given the speed of today’s local networks, 10/100Mbps or Gigabit Ethernet, and of most people’s ISP/BSP broadband connection this 300-400 bytes/sec of traffic gets lost. The gauge is designed to ignore traffic below 1Kb/sec to ignore this noise. This may not be ideal, but heck this is an experimental piece of software folks!

The Future of G-Gauge

I had lots of ideas about what to implement in the Power Toy and not all of them got implemented for this initial release. Please post feedback as to what you’d like to see as future improvements.

Some ideas left on the table were,

Add a reporting mechanism so you can see reports of network usage over a period of days.

Allow the horizontal scale of the gauge(s) to be adjusted. Currently it is a 5 minute window of activity.

Allow the vertical scale of the gauge to be constrained as a constant. For example you may want to see the maximum value on the scale be the theoretical maximum data rate of your broadband connection.