“I know my ISP isn’t playing a fast one on me about my bandwidth usage, but nonetheless, I wish I could monitor or keep track of how much bandwidth I am using. But the trouble is that I do not know how to bell the cat” admits Sudhir Patnaik from Bhubaneswar, Odisha.

“That’s not a big issue’” ensured friend Sushant Giri, while offering solutions as given below.

One of the easiest ways of checking your bandwidth usage entails installation of a Bandwidth Monitor on your computer; while the following apps will help you gain access to your goal easier.

Net Worx (Windows) is an undemanding and easily adaptable tool that will help you objectively evaluate your bandwidth consumption rate. It will also help you gather bandwidth usage data as well as measure the speed of your internet or other (if any) network connections. What’s more, NetWorx will facilitate identifying possible sources of network issues, while at the same time ensuring that you do not go beyond the bandwidth limits specified by your ISP, as also tracking down surreptitious network activity such as those of Trojan horses and/or corruptive hacker attacks.

Net Limiter (Windows) will take bandwidth monitoring a further step ahead, while tracking bandwidth used per application. It also does bandwidth shaping, while limiting transfer rates for precise applications so that they do not affect other applications.

Free Meter (Windows) monitors any or all network interfaces. Ping/ Trace / UPnP utilities. Also, Email notifier (POP / IMAP). You may also label it as a super-simple, no-frills bandwidth monitor that doesn’t depend on anything else.

 Surplus Meter (OS X) – Earlier defined as NetTracker, it keeps a close watch on your bandwidth use. It can also work out daily allowance, while at the same time configuring how much you have essentially used for the month. Even though the interface is simple and uncluttered, it lacks the alarms and graphs found in comparable Windows app. An important feature – progress bars help track the days left in the month.

iStat Pro (OS X) is a free Dashboard widget, which apart from monitoring your bandwidth, also keeps a watch on your overall system health. Even though it has not been solely designed for bandwidth monitoring, yet it displays activity and total usage.

 If stat (Linux) may be defined as an unassuming lightweight bandwidth monitor that supports Linux, Solaris, BSD, IRIX and a few more. Even though it does not have very many features on its own, but whenever you intend to create something to collect bandwidth data, it will support your network interface ungrudgingly.

Bandwidth D (Linux) can not only be able to monitor your bandwidth, but also turn it into a database. Moreover, it can create charts and graphs, while displaying your total bandwidth used over time.

Dark stat (Linux) may be defined as a cross-platform, real-time network statistics tool that can capture network traffic, compute statistics in regard to usage, while serving the reports over HTTP. Darkstat is also considered as a portable, single-threaded Web-based network traffic analyzer