How can I monitor browser tab network usage?

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xenon2000

xenon2000

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In my searching I found this thread - http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/39382-42-what-programes-internet

But that only covers processes, not individual tabs using high level domain names or better yet, tab titles.

From that thread link above,



This is a great method to see network activity about a process. And I love the Resource Monitor tool built into windows.

But does anyone know of a good way to check on network activity of each tab for each browser? Using Chrome as an example. Resource monitor will show multiple chrome.exe processes and the address. But that doesn't quickly translate to what tab.

Chrome has "Stats for Nerds". But that only covers memory and is a great tool for checking for memory leaks and heavy memory hogging tabs. Would be great if it also monitored network activity, but it doesn't.

That is only a chrome example. Similar issue with Firefox and the others.

If this can't be done natively in Windows or within each browser, is there a 3rd party tool that covers this? I will keep searching.
 
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xenon2000

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It's actually Network Monitor II version 18.x, which I already have installed and that only gives you an overall network usage. Not per tab. This is actually why I started looking into this because I was noticing constant network usage when I wasn't doing anything.
 
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xenon2000

xenon2000

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Sorry, I should have mentioned that as well. As I use Stats for Nerds. Which you get to from a link from the Chrome Task manager, did fail to recognize that it does show the tab data usage in real time. But not graphed. Which I wasn't asking for anyways. Though this only covers Chrome.

This will likely be enough for me for chrome. Though I would love to see it graphed if I can find an app for that.

But I guess now I just need to find something usable for Firefox, IE, and Opera. I don't use Safari.

I do like this suggestion and I am so used to skipping this screen when going to Stats for Nerds that I failed to notice the network usage. Though sadly it doesn't state if it is inbound or outbound. Would be nice to tell the difference. It would also be nice if it would tally a total for each direction since the tab has been open. So I could really see the overall data hog when idle.
 
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xenon2000

xenon2000

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Real Network Monitor does not report domain names or any browser and tab stats for network activity. It only shows overall traffic data. Which I can already see using Windows Resource Monitor.

The reminder by K1114 to use the Chrome task manager, works great, but only for Chrome and it only shows total tab traffic not in and out traffic. But I also have Firefox open most of the time as well. And often IE and Opera. So the ideal solution will be 1 tool that can monitor the inbound and outbound traffic for each tab and actually tells me either the tab title and/or domain/URL.

While 1 tool would be ideal. At this point I would be fine with a tool for each browser. So far the Windows Resource Monitor is the best tool I have seen so far for the amount of data I would like to see. Unfortunately it doesn't connect the data with each tab. Ever though it appears to be showing data for each domain.
 
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xenon2000

xenon2000

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I am starting to get the feeling that you haven't tried any of these products. While I have tried the other ones you mentioned, I can't find anything that says that Spiceworks will do what I am looking for. It is more of an entire IT solution like those offered by Solarwinds. SNMP services and more. While that is great and I like Solarwinds Orion, I highly doubt this huge tool will do what I need. Still looking into Spiceworks and may try it in a virtual machine at this point. But with a 63 MB installer, Spiceworks is much more than network monitoring. But I will check into it more in the meantime. But I have a feeling you haven't used this suggestion yourself either.

Another thing I should point out, is that I am just looking for a tool to run on my local system only. It doesn't need to monitor the bandwidth for my entire LAN. So not looking for a custom router solution or remote solutions that use SNMP or Netflow, etc.
 
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xenon2000

xenon2000

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Just tried to test Spiceworks. Not going to work. It is exactly like the Solarwinds solution, just free. Which is great. And in a corporate setting or if I really wanted to cover my whole LAN and devices, this looks like a great tool. And I may even go to the trouble of setting this up to check out my whole network. But given that I have setup Solarwinds Orion before and this is taking me through the same process, this is not the right tool for this task. There will be way too much setup to get this to show me anything and even then, without the right hardware that support Netflow and without setting up all the SNMP requirements, this tool simply will not do what I need on my local computer.
 
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xenon2000

xenon2000

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I already have tools to monitor Cpu and memory usage per tab. I am now trying to do the same for network usage. If you check out the Chrome Task Manager that K1114 reminded me about, it shows the network usage per tab, but sadly it is not a graph and it is not a breakdown of the inbound and outbound traffic.

The point of all of this, is that when I have 100+ tabs open across multiple browsers, overnight, etc. I can see in my overall Network monitoring gadget, that my local PC has a fairly steady stream of data moving in each direction. Yet nothing is downloading, no videos playing, etc. I know that solutions like gmail, facebook, and others, have live updates to them and so those sites will always have traffic when open. And that is fine. But I want to see how much for each one and if there are any spikes over time during the night. And using that data, I may decide to close certain tabs.

Router log files will do me no good for this.
 
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xenon2000

xenon2000

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No torrents. Occasional Youtube videos and very rarely a whole show or movie on Amazon Prime, Hulu, and Ultraviolet. I do a lot of research, social media, email, etc for work and personal. I have plenty of bandwidth for both up and down. I don't have any issues. I am just curious about information. The Resource Monitor is a great tool. And I can see a lot about what processes are doing. But tabs are not identified there. Friefox has one process for all the tabs (per running instance). And chrome makes many processes. But not a 1:1 ratio to tab count. Possibly a process per domain. My current tab count is low, at 31 tabs.

The number of tabs is not the point though. Anything more than 1 tab per browser and tools like Resource Monitor are no good at telling you what each tab is using for network usage. Chrome task manager is near perfect, but the lack of network traffic details and lack of historical graphing, makes it not useful for the data I want to check out right now.

My main common tabs are email and social media (fb, linkedin, etc.) And the rest are just about anything. So I am guessing it's the social media causing the most idle traffic. And when I talk about traffic. I am talking single digit kilobytes/sec when idle. The usage is really low. But not zero. I am simply curious where it all comes from. And I like to learn new things. So I would love to find a tool that does something like this since it seems to be a challenge.

Anyway, just something I was curious about. If I really cared, I would turn my computers off when not in use to stop traffic and power usage. Yet I leave it on 24/7. lol Given the nature of modern web pages/apps, I am a shocked that the Chrome task manager doesn't have more network usage stats per tab. The rest of the stats are great!
 
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xenon2000

xenon2000

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Thanks for the suggestions. I was just posting the question to challenge us. It's just a question, not a problem that needs fixing. So far all the solutions I keep finding, are for tracking browser usage. Such as employee internet usage or child usage monitoring. Oh well, it was worth checking to see if anyone on here had done this before. Thanks again.
 
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