MonBand

You never quite know the toll that browsing the internet takes on your bandwidth. Going to the Task Manager and utilizing the built-in network monitor is a valid way to check on your adapter's performance, but even then, the process can be a bit cumbersome.

Third-party software can provide more particular and specialized information about your machine, and MonBand can help you monitor your network bandwidth more easily and efficiently. It provides a standalone app you can use to view the bandwidth, as well as a toolbar function to display your network performance at a glance.

While getting the tool to work requires little work, enabling the toolbar functionality involves a few more steps to get fully working. It's worth knowing that the toolbar is not available on Windows 11 — Microsoft has disabled that feature altogether in the new OS release.

Regardless, to enable the toolbar functionality on Windows 10, you need to open a Command Prompt with Admin rights, then execute the regsvr32 "C:\(file location)\MonBand\MonBand.Windows.ComHost.comhost.dll" command. You'll then have to run the Standalone executable, where you'll be able to set the monitoring and logging.

The standalone file acts as a settings menu of sorts, which serves to tweak the toolbar's behavior. Through the app, users can add and remove bandwidth monitors, as well as performance counters.

You can monitor an address through the SNMP menu, and you'll have to enter a relevant address and its port for it to work. This works especially well when you want to monitor a remote network interface.

When it comes to the Performance Counters options, the monitoring can be tweaked by the user. Add a network interface to monitor, and you'll be able to see the bandwidth performance for it. In addition to that, users can also set a logging level: debug, trace, and many other events can be logged.

MonBand is a tool for those who want to observe their network bandwidth more closely, and it does so in an intuitive, easy-to-get-around way.