Pulse is now available: live traffic graphs for a server, a service, or the internet connection in your house.
Two places to measure from
Traffic monitoring usually assumes you control the machine carrying the traffic. That covers servers and not much else.
Pulse reads from either of two places. It can measure the host it runs on, which is the ordinary case for a server. Or it can ask the router for the WAN counters it already keeps, which is what makes a home connection measurable at all — consumer routers do not run third-party software, and an ISP-supplied gateway is often locked outright. In that mode the agent runs on any always-on machine on the same network and reads the gateway over UPnP, a published standard your router probably already speaks.
The difference matters more than it sounds. Measuring a laptop tells you what the laptop did. Measuring the gateway tells you what the household did — every device, including the ones you cannot install anything on.
What it graphs
Throughput and packet rates, connection counts and SYN rates at layer 4. Request rates, status-code mix and latency at layer 7. Live, with the timeline advancing as data arrives rather than compressing to fit.
Graphs can be read as a grid or focused one at a time. A focused graph is wider and shows proportionally more history at the same visual density.
Missing is not zero
A consumer router is not obliged to report everything. Some models publish byte counters but not packet counters. Some answer for a while and then stop.
Pulse distinguishes "nothing moved" from "never reported", and says which at startup. A monitoring tool that quietly renders an unavailable metric as a flat line at zero is worse than one that shows nothing, because a flat line reads as information. If a number is not being collected you should find that out immediately — not during an incident, while staring at a graph that has been reassuring you for a month.
The same applies when a counter goes backwards. A router reboot resets its counters, and the difference across that boundary is meaningless. Pulse shows a one-sample gap rather than the enormous phantom spike the arithmetic would otherwise produce.
Where it runs
Seven builds: Linux on x86-64, ARM64 and 32-bit ARM — a Raspberry Pi makes a good always-on box for gateway mode — plus macOS on Apple Silicon and Intel, and Windows on x86-64 and ARM64. There is no runtime to install.
Status pages
Any monitor can publish a read-only status page on its own link. Useful for a service page, or for showing a host that something is genuinely wrong without handing over access to your account.
What it is not
Pulse is a traffic telemetry tool. It is not an intrusion detection system, it does not inspect payloads, and it does not read the contents of anything crossing your network. It counts.