When you need to understand what’s accessing your PC’s internet connection then installing a network monitor will tell you more. GlassWire is a great example, easy to use yet providing in-depth reports on all your internet traffic.

If you’re troubleshooting issues on someone else’s PC, though, a portable toolkit like TCP Monitor Plus could be a better choice. It’s smaller, simpler, with nothing like the same depth of reporting, but still has more than enough power to investigate any network problems.

The program arrives in a 325KB zip file which extracts to a single executable and a couple of text files. It opens on a simple tabbed interface, starting with the Traffic Monitor, but with a range of other options just a click away (Packet Monitor, Session Monitor, Packet Filter, Interface, Statistics, NSLOOKUP, NETSTAT, WHOIS, PING, TRACERT).

TCP Monitor Plus didn’t detect our internet connection, so at first the monitor displayed precisely nothing at all. Fortunately it’s easy enough to select the network interface you need from a list. Or if you’re not sure what to choose, just start at the top and press the Down arrow key until you find something with an “Operational Status” of “OPERATIONAL”.

A scrolling window displays your network traffic details in real time

Once you’ve located the correct interface, the main screen displays a scrolling view of your network traffic, along with text figures giving real-time maximums for your send and receive speeds. There’s also an “inactivity” time which pops up when your connection hasn’t been used for a few seconds.

A summary at the top of the screen provides details like the total upload and download amounts, average send and receive speeds, number of Unicast/ non-Unicast packets, and so on.

Right-clicking the window displays options to copy this summary data to the clipboard, view more detailed reports of various types, or reset the graph and start again. These can be useful, but they’re a little messy: the reports are displayed over the top of the window in a transparent pane, so you can’t always read them clearly, and there’s no option to select or save them.

Elsewhere, Session Monitor displays active internet connections with the process responsible for initiating them. This works well enough, and right-clicking displays more options to copy data to the clipboard, run network commands (ping, traceroute) on destination URLs and more.

The Packet Filter was a little disappointing, as it turned out to work on Windows 2000/ XP only (error messages in the original Japanese didn’t help, either). And for some reason we couldn’t get the Packet Monitor to run at all.

Most of the other tabs were simpler than we expected, just shells for the standard Windows console tools. Click Ping, say, enter an address, click Start, and the program runs Ping in the background and displays any output in plain text.

If you were hoping for a GUI then this will probably be disappointing, but it can still save you time. You don’t have to open a command line, or manually type commands. The program keeps a history of your domains, so there’s no need to re-enter them each time. And because each tool is in a separate tab, once you’ve set a TRACERT running you can immediately click PING and do something else. (That might not be a good idea if you’re measuring response times, but it could be useful sometimes.)

TCP Monitor Plus has some issues. It should automatically detect your active network connection; reports need smarter formatting to make them more readable; some of the functions need more testing (the Session Monitor has a Logging tool but we never got this to work).

Still, the core monitoring functions work well, there are easy ways to access common networking tools, and the program is also tiny, portable and no-strings free. Give it a try.