How to get an alert when an app uses too much data

With Pulse by Zaweba you can be told as soon as one app goes over a daily data limit. Open the Alerts page, turn on the option for an app using more than a set amount, and choose the number of gigabytes per day. When any single program passes it, Pulse shows a Windows notification from its tray icon once and adds the event to its alert log.

This is aimed at people on capped or metered connections, where a runaway update or sync can use a month's allowance before anyone notices. It is just as handy on a shared home connection when you want to know which machine, and which program, is responsible.

Setting the limit

Go to the Alerts page (Ctrl+4, or from the View menu). The daily data per app alert measures one app's network data over a day, and its default is 5 GB. You can set it anywhere from 0.1 GB to 10,000 GB, so it suits a tiny mobile allowance as well as a big fibre line where you only want to hear about something extreme.

Think about what a normal day looks like before choosing a figure. A streaming service or a game download may use several gigabytes quite legitimately. A good approach is to leave Pulse running for a few days first, then open the History page and check Top bandwidth users for Today and This week. That shows you what your heavy users usually reach, and you can set the alert just above it.

What happens when it fires

Each alert in Pulse fires once, then re-arms when things return to normal, so you won't be pestered by repeated pop-ups about the same app. The notice appears as a standard Windows notification from the Pulse tray icon. It is also written to the Alert log on the Alerts page with the date, the time and the message, so if you were away from the PC you can still see what happened. The page has a Refresh button, and when nothing has happened it simply says "No alerts yet".

For the alert to work, Pulse needs to be running. Closing the window keeps it in the tray, and the "Start Pulse when I sign in" setting starts it there each time you log in, so the watch carries on without you thinking about it.

Live counting or Windows' records

Unless you have allowed live per-app network counting, Pulse uses Windows' own data-usage records for each app, which lag about a minute and are grouped coarsely. For a daily limit that is accurate enough. If you would like live figures as well, Settings has an "Allow live per-app network" button that adds your account to the Performance Log Users group once, after an administrator prompt and a sign-out.

Making use of the warning

A notification is the start of the job, not the end. When one arrives, open the Live page and sort the network column to see whether the app is still busy. If it is, and it shouldn't be, select it and use End task, or Open file location if you are not sure what it is. Then look in the program's own settings for automatic downloads, sync or update options that you can switch off or schedule.

Afterwards, the History page shows the network graph for the day, so you can see when the traffic started and how long it ran. Over a few weeks that builds a clear picture of how your data is really spent. Pulse by Zaweba keeps all of this on the PC itself, with no account or cloud involved.