Catching a data-hungry app early with Pulse by Zaweba

On a metered connection, a mobile hotspot or broadband with a monthly cap, one runaway app can eat a week's allowance in an afternoon. Pulse by Zaweba has an alert for exactly this. It warns you when any one app uses more than a set number of gigabytes of network data in a single day.

Setting it up

You'll find it on the Alerts page. The default limit is 5 GB per app per day, and you can set it anywhere from 0.1 to 10,000 GB. The limit applies to each app on its own, not the PC as a whole, so the alert tells you which program crossed the line.

Choosing a number is about your allowance. On a tight mobile plan, a low figure such as half a gigabyte will catch an unexpected update or a sync tool waking up. On generous home broadband you might set it high so it only fires for something truly unusual, like a cloud backup restarting from scratch. If you stream or game a lot, set it above what those normally use, or you'll be told about things you already know.

How it counts

Pulse keeps track of each app's network use as part of its one-minute history, and it also stores Windows' own hourly per-app data-usage records. That means the alert works whether or not you've turned on live per-app network counting in Settings. With live counting on, the figures are up to the second. Without it, they come from Windows' records, which lag about a minute and are grouped coarsely. For a daily limit, either is plenty.

When it fires

The alert appears as a Windows notification from Pulse's tray icon and is added to the Alert log on the Alerts page with the date, time and message. Each alert fires once and then re-arms when things return to normal, so you're told once rather than every minute after the limit is passed.

What to do next

Open the Live page and type the app's name in the Find box. The Network down and Network up columns show whether it's still pulling data now. If you don't recognise it, Open file location shows the folder its exe lives in.

Most programs that use a lot of data have their own settings: update schedules, sync limits, streaming quality. Changing those is usually better than closing the app every time. If you need it to stop right now, End task closes every process of that app after a red confirmation, though it may simply start again later.

For a fuller picture, the History page's top bandwidth users list ranks apps by data used Today, Yesterday or This week. It helps you see whether the app that set off the alert is a regular heavy user or a one-off.

A few tips

Set the limit before you travel or switch to a hotspot, not after. The alert is most useful as an early warning.

Remember it works per app. Several apps each using a little under the limit won't trigger it, so check the top bandwidth users list now and then as well.

And keep Pulse running in the tray. The alert can only watch while Pulse by Zaweba is running, which is why it's built to sit quietly in the notification area all day.