How to See Network Usage on a Mac’s Dock

by Alessia Martine office.com/setup

These days we can’t even think about life without the internet. It is as vital as the grocery these days, and almost everyone has access to the internet. When you access the internet on your Mac, your data is at risk of running out. Sometimes your Mac can utilize the internet even when you are not using it. It might use the internet for updating its firmware and drivers. Background updates and processes don’t only consume your internet data unnecessarily but also decrease your overall network speed.

Therefore, it is crucial to track and view your real-time network usage on your Mac. In this article, we are about to show how to enable Activity Monitor in your Mac’s Dock. It will allow you to always keep an eye on your Mac’s internet usage.

Simple Method to View Network Utilization on Your Mac’s Dock

Please follow the instructions given here to make it happen:

First and foremost, you need to navigate to the Activity Monitor on your Mac. If you haven’t done that before, don’t panic as we are showing how to do it. You only need to keep on reading.
On your Mac’s keyboard, please hit the Command + Space keys at once.
Now, type in “activity monitor” with your keyboard.
Hit the Return key on the keyboard.
Select the Activity Monitor app from the result to launch the Activity Monitor on your Mac’s display.
When the window appears, please select Dock Icon.
After that, head to the “Show Network Usage” option.
When you do that, the dock icon of Activity Monitor will turn into an animated screen that portrays a network activity monitor.
It will update every 5 seconds, flipping from right to left to show you the network usage.
That is how to place the activity monitor into your Mac’s Dock. Now if you want to change the way it shows you the network usage, keep on reading.
You can edit the time window in which the monitor updates. To do that, head to View in the current window.
Then click on Update Frequency from the menu bar located on the top of your screen.
Choose the time as per your wish and save settings.

With the default options, you will see the network graph showing you “packets in per second” with blue color and packets out per second with red color. Now it is a very basic count of internet data consumption. It might be a little complicated to understand.

You can change these units into bytes so that you always see how much bytes your Mac is eating. To do so, please go to Activity Monitor. You can open it by pressing Command + 1 keys altogether on your keyboard.

In the Activity Monitor window, head to Network from the tabs.
Look at the small graph at the lower of the window.
Select the option that says Packets.
Now select it as Data.
Once you do that, the graph in your Mac’s Dock will modify quickly.

From now on, the blue color will display data read per second, and the red color will represent bytes of data written per second.

Now you can close the Activity Monitor window as your Dock network monitor is active.

Whatever you do on your Mac, it will display the real-time network activity in the Dock. That way, you will be able to keep track of the data used by your Mac.

Elina John is a self-professed security expert; she has been making the people aware of the security threats. Her passion is to write about Cybersecurity, cryptography, malware, social engineering, internet, and new media. She writes for McAfee security products at mcafee.com/activate.

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