Network Monitor

A lightweight, unobtrusive desktop network monitoring application for Windows. It provides a transparent, click-through widget to track your upload and download speeds in real-time, coupled with a background Windows service that continually logs data usage.

Features

• Click-Through Glass UI: A sleek, transparent overlay built with tkinter and ctypes. It blends into your desktop environment and lets you click through it without interrupting your workflow.
• Accurate Traffic Monitoring: Leverages psutil to intelligently measure bandwidth strictly on the primary internet-facing adapter. It ignores local loopback, LAN shares, and virtual adapters (like VM/WSL) for ISP-accurate readings.
• Per-App Usage Tracking: Maps active external TCP/UDP connections to running processes, providing a granular breakdown of which individual apps are consuming data.
• Background Windows Service: Includes an optional decoupled service (NetworkUsageTracker) built with win32serviceutil. It runs persistently in the background, logging daily network usage to a local SQLite database even when the UI is closed. Includes automated 30-day data retention cleanup.
• System Tray Integration: Sits quietly in your system tray via pystray for easy access to the dashboard, toggling the widget, and setting up run-at-startup.
• Smart Resource Management: Handles Sleep/Wake lifecycle events gracefully, managing adapters dropping or reconnecting without crashing.
• IP & Network Detection: Rapidly fetches external and internal IPs, along with the active network profile name.

Architecture

• main.py: Entry point for the desktop widget and system tray app.
• service.py: The background Windows service for persistent data logging.
• network_scanner.py: Core logic for speed tracking, adapter sensing, and IP detection.
• database.py: SQLite backend for logging and storing traffic history.
• widget.py & dashboard.py: UI components for the glass overlay and detailed statistics dashboard.

Requirements

• Python 3.8+
• Windows OS
• Dependencies (see requirements.txt):
  • psutil
  • pystray
  • Pillow
  • requests
  • pywin32 (for the background service)

Installation & Usage

Using CMD (From Source)

1. Install Dependencies:

   pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Run the Desktop Widget:

   python main.py

3. Install & Start the Background Service (Optional): Requires Administrator privileges.

   python service.py install
   python service.py start

Using Executable (.exe)

Simply double-click the setup.exe executable to run the widget. No Python installation or manual dependency setup is required!

Building

A build_all.py script is provided to bundle the application into a standalone Windows Executable (.exe) via PyInstaller, embedding the custom app_icon.ico and producing NetworkMonitor.exe.