GUI Guide

The desktop GUI (Desktop edition) shows your network across three faces: Live, History, and a Hosts breakdown. It connects to the daemon on its own — no sudo needed.

Tip

Don’t see the GUI? It ships with the Desktop edition. The headless Server edition only includes the CLI. See Installation.

Live

The Live view shows real-time throughput, second by second:

• ↓ / ↑ charts side by side: download (rx) and upload (tx), with real per-second rates.
• Live apps: which applications are consuming bandwidth right now, sorted by rate.
• Interfaces: usage per network interface, with its IPv4 shown below.

Live data refreshes at 1 Hz, crisp and unanimated (no smoothing to throw you off). If the daemon reconnects, you’ll see a subtle indicator.

Note

A very brief spike can look lower here than on a wider-window meter. Live data is sampled roughly every second, so what you’re seeing are real, sustained bytes/sec — not a smoothed average. That’s honest design, not a measurement flaw.

History

The History view shows cumulative totals across the entire record:

• A chart for the selected range (range chips).
• A breakdown by category (apps / interfaces) with cumulative totals.

Since history never expires, you can look back as far as the daemon has been recording.

Hosts

The Hosts breakdown shows which remote servers each app talks to, by hostname (not just IP):

• Live: “Hosts · now” — who you’re talking to at this very moment.
• History: cumulative domains, collapsed by root domain (eTLD+1). For example, several IPs under deb.debian.org get grouped as debian.org.
• Connectionless UDP traffic that can’t be resolved shows up as (unnamed).

Name resolution uses the system resolver; apps with their own encrypted DNS (e.g., Firefox with DoH) may show up as a raw IP — that’s expected and honest.

Note

Each app keeps its top ~50 servers by traffic; the rest are grouped into a single “(other)” row. Apps and interfaces themselves have no cap — the limit only applies to the per-app host breakdown.

Switching between views

Use the GUI’s Live ↔ History toggle. The Hosts breakdown is available in both modes (Hosts now / cumulative domains).