Live per-app network speed without running as admin

Seeing each app's network speed live normally needs administrator rights, but Pulse by Zaweba has a way round it. In Settings, under Live network per app, choose "Allow live per-app network" once. It adds your Windows account to the Performance Log Users group (Windows asks for administrator approval for that one change, then you sign out and in again). From then on Pulse counts every app's traffic as it happens, while running as a normal user.

This is a one-off step. After it, you never need to run Pulse as administrator to get live figures.

Why Windows makes this awkward

Counting each program's network traffic live means starting a Windows event trace, a stream of events about network activity. Windows only lets administrators and members of the Performance Log Users group start one. Most monitoring tools solve this by asking to run as administrator every time. Pulse would rather not, so it runs as a normal user and offers to add you to that group instead.

Until you do, Pulse still shows network use per app, using Windows' own data-usage records, the same data behind Data usage in Windows Settings. On the Live page the "Network down" column then reads "Data today". Those figures lag about a minute and are grouped coarsely, which is fine for finding a heavy user over a day but not for watching speeds second by second.

Setting it up

Open Pulse and go to Settings with Ctrl+5. Find the Live network per app section and click the Allow button. Approve the Windows prompt. Then sign out of Windows and sign back in, because group membership only takes effect at sign-in.

When you open Pulse again, the Live page counts each app's TCP and UDP traffic live. The note bar above the table tells you which mode is active, and the settings text says whether live counting is on, or whether Pulse has the right but couldn't start the trace for some reason.

Watching it live

On the Live page (Ctrl+1) the Network down and Network up columns now show each app's current rates. Click either heading to sort biggest first. All the processes of one program are gathered into a single row, so a browser with dozens of helpers shows as one figure. The Network graph across the top shows the whole PC's download and upload, with the rates written beside it.

This is handy for questions that need a quick answer: what is uploading right now, which program is slowing the video call, is the game download actually running.

What stays the same

Pulse still runs as a normal user. History works either way; the History page's Top bandwidth users list uses Windows' hourly per-app records as well as Pulse's own minute-by-minute figures, so it fills in whether or not live counting is on. The daily data per app alert works in both modes too.

If you'd rather not change group membership at all, you lose nothing but the second-by-second detail. Pulse by Zaweba was designed so that either choice gives you a working monitor.