Is there a system monitor with no account or telemetry?
Pulse by Zaweba is a system monitor that keeps everything on your PC: no account, no cloud, no telemetry, and history stored in a local file you control.
Yes, there is: Pulse by Zaweba is a system monitor with no account, no cloud and no telemetry. It measures your PC on your PC, keeps its history in a local file in your own AppData folder, and doesn't send anything anywhere. It is free software and runs as a normal user.
A system monitor sees more about a computer than most programs do: every app you run, how long you run it, how much data it uses and when. That is exactly the kind of record you might not want leaving the house.
What Pulse records, and where it goes
Pulse records one minute of history at a time. Each minute it stores the machine's CPU, memory, GPU, network and disk use, each busy app's CPU time, network and disk bytes and peak memory, and each sensor's peak and average. It writes these to history.db, a local SQLite file in %APPDATA%\Zaweba\Pulse, alongside its settings. Settings > History sets how many days to keep, from 1 to 365, with 30 as the default.
That record exists only on the PC. Nothing is uploaded, synced or shared with Zaweba. There's no sign-in to create, no dashboard on a website and no usage statistics sent home.
The one thing it shares, and with whom
Pulse can serve its latest readings to other apps on the same PC, so that Scene by Zaweba can draw gauges on the desktop. This uses a named pipe that only your own Windows user can connect to, and it sends only the current readings as a single line of data. It never leaves the machine. If you don't use Scene, switch it off in Settings > Share readings with other apps.
Privacy and permissions go together
Pulse runs as a normal user rather than as administrator. Everything in the main app works that way. The only part that needs more rights is the optional sensor helper, for CPU and motherboard temperatures, fan speeds and SATA or USB drive health. If you turn it on, Windows asks you first, and the helper only reads sensors, accepts no commands and stops when Pulse closes. Pulse doesn't install the old WinRing0 driver; CPU and board sensors use the separately installed, signed PawnIO driver.
Live per-app network counting is also optional. It needs your account adding to Windows' Performance Log Users group once, which Pulse asks before doing.
Light as well as private
A monitor shouldn't become a burden of its own. On the test PC Pulse used about 0.1 per cent CPU and 70 MB in the background. Closing the window really closes it while Pulse carries on in the tray.
Is it right for you?
If you want to understand what your PC is doing (which app used the data, why the fan roared, whether a drive is wearing out) without handing that information to anyone, Pulse fits. It doesn't need an internet connection at all to do its job. Help > How Pulse measures things explains where every figure comes from, and ends by saying the history is kept only on this PC.
Pulse by Zaweba is free under its licence, with no account and nothing to subscribe to.
