NetMon — which connection is better for gaming?

⚠️ Disclaimer: This app is 100% vibecoded — written by an AI (Claude) from natural-language instructions, with no professional security or code audit. It's a hobby project, provided as-is, with no warranty of any kind. I (the author) take no responsibility for any damage, data loss, security issue, or other harm that may result from downloading, building, or running it. Review the code yourself if that matters to you — it's all in this repo. See Security scanning below for what's automatically checked, and use at your own risk.

Two versions live here:

• NetMonGui — a standalone desktop app with a live table and a latency graph per adapter, plus a button to tell Windows to actually prefer your best connection. This is the one most people want. See below.
• netmon.ps1 — the original single-file PowerShell script, console only, zero build tools required. See Console version.

Both measure the same thing: pings every active network connection on your PC (Ethernet, USB tether, Wi-Fi — whatever is plugged in and up) once a second, from that connection specifically, and show latency + jitter + packet loss over three windows:

• Now — last ~3 seconds
• 30s — last 30 seconds
• 1h — rolling last hour
• Session — since you started the tool

The connection with the best combined score (low latency, low jitter, low loss) is marked with *. The connection Windows is currently actually using for internet traffic (based on route + interface metric) is marked [OS] — these two can disagree, e.g. Windows may default to Ethernet by metric even while your hotspot is measurably better, in which case Dota 2/CS2 (and everything else) are routing over the worse link without you knowing.

Admin rights: NetMon runs unprivileged by default and never asks for elevation on its own. It only prompts for admin (a UAC dialog) when you click something that needs it:

• "Prefer this adapter" — needs admin to change the adapter's network metric. See Adapter priority.
• "Per-process bandwidth" — needs the whole app running elevated to read per-process network activity. See Per-process bandwidth.

Nothing else in the app ever touches either.

NetMonGui — desktop app

A Windows app with a live table, a graph, and a few things the console version can't do:

• Live latency and jitter graphs — one line per adapter, last 2 minutes, stacked below the table, so you can see the difference instead of reading numbers, with reference lines for common gaming-latency tiers (shooters, MOBA/RTS, casual) so you know at a glance where you stand.
• Extra targets — see below: track ping/jitter to something other than the default target (e.g. a game server) side by side, on the same adapters.
• "Prefer this adapter" — see Adapter priority below.
• Per-process bandwidth — see below: which app is actually eating your connection when things get laggy.

Getting it

Grab the latest build from Releases — two options:

• NetMonGui-win-Setup.exe (recommended) — installs to your user folder (no admin needed), adds Start Menu/Desktop shortcuts, and auto-updates: NetMon quietly checks for a newer release on startup, downloads it in the background, and restarts itself to apply it when one's found. You'll always be on the latest version without thinking about it.
• NetMonGui-portable-vX.Y.Z.exe — a single file, nothing installed, nothing written outside the folder it's in. Doesn't auto-update — grab a new one from Releases when you want the latest.

Every release also attaches NetMon-StreamDeck-Plugin-vX.Y.Z.streamDeckPlugin — see the Stream Deck plugin if you have a Stream Deck and want live ping/jitter on a key; just double-click the file to install it, no Node.js or building required.

Or build it yourself locally — see Building.

Adapter priority

Windows doesn't expose a "prefer this connection" toggle in Settings, but the mechanism it uses internally is scriptable: every adapter has an interface metric, and Windows routes traffic over whichever active default route has the lowest effective metric (route metric + interface metric). Click "Prefer this adapter" on the row you want and the app will:

1. Ask Windows for elevation (a UAC prompt — the app itself runs unprivileged, only this one action needs admin rights).
2. Lower that adapter's IPv4 metric to 1.
3. Reset the other monitored adapters back to automatic metric.

Windows re-evaluates routes shortly after, and the [OS] marker in the table will move to confirm it took effect. This is a real, persistent change to your network configuration (it survives reboots) — nothing here is fake or purely cosmetic. If you ever want to undo it by hand:

Set-NetIPInterface -InterfaceAlias "<adapter name>" -AutomaticMetric Enabled

Extra targets

The default target (top right) is a general internet reachability check — it won't necessarily match what a specific game reports. The dropdown ships with a few presets (Cloudflare 1.1.1.1, Google 8.8.8.8, and a handful of Dota 2 Steam Datagram Relay IPs by region) plus a Custom… option that reveals a text box for typing in any host or IP. Dota 2, CS2, etc. don't ping over ICMP at all: they go through Valve's Steam Datagram Relay, a UDP relay network that can pick a different path (and congest independently of) whatever route ICMP takes to some generic Valve IP. So picking a Valve target is a useful comparison signal, not a guarantee it'll match the in-game number exactly — and the regional IPs beyond the original three (Vienna/Luxembourg/Stockholm) were sourced from a community list, not verified against Valve directly, so treat them as best-effort.

Under the charts, "Extra targets" lets you add named targets (label + host/IP) that get pinged in parallel with the default one, from the same adapters, each getting its own compact card + mini latency/jitter charts. Good candidates: a game server's datacenter IP (found via the game's own console, e.g. status in CS2/Dota 2, or a community list of that game's server IPs/regions), or any other host you want to track alongside general connectivity. Targets aren't persisted across restarts yet — re-add them if you close the app. They're also exposed through the Stream Deck plugin, so you can put a game server's ping on its own key.

Per-process bandwidth

Tick "Per-process bandwidth" next to the target box and NetMon shows a live table of the top 10 processes sending/receiving data, with a Current / Total switch in the corner: Current ranks by live throughput (what's hogging the connection right now), Total ranks by total data moved this session (down + up combined, shown as KB/MB/GB in its own column) — the one to check if something quietly downloaded gigabytes in the background. Once a process shows up it stays tracked even if it goes quiet, so a chatty process that's briefly idle doesn't vanish from the list.

This needs to see which process owns each network packet, which only kernel code can tell you — same mechanism Task Manager's Network column and Resource Monitor use (a realtime ETW trace on the network kernel provider). That means it only works elevated:

1. If NetMon isn't already running as administrator, ticking the box asks to restart it as admin (one UAC prompt). Your session stats reset when it restarts — the adapter table starts fresh.
2. Untick it any time to stop tracking; the panel disappears and no admin rights are needed for anything else in the app.

Nothing here is persistent — it's a live trace, not a log, and stops the moment you untick the box or close the app.

Building

Requires the .NET SDK (comes with Visual Studio's ".NET desktop development" workload, or install the SDK standalone). From this folder:

Build-NetMonGui.bat

or manually:

cd NetMonGui
dotnet publish -c Release

That produces one self-contained NetMonGui.exe (~65 MB — it bundles the .NET runtime, so it runs on any Windows 10/11 x64 PC with nothing else installed) at NetMonGui\bin\Release\net10.0-windows\win-x64\publish\. Build-NetMonGui.bat also copies it up to the repo root for convenience. This is the portable build — same as what's on the Releases page, just built locally, and it won't auto-update.

Releases & auto-update (for maintainers)

.github/workflows/release.yml builds and publishes a new GitHub Release automatically on every push to main, using Velopack to package NetMonGui-win-Setup.exe (with an update feed) plus the portable exe. To cut a release: bump <Version> in NetMonGui/NetMonGui.csproj and merge to main — pushing without bumping it will just fail the workflow (that version already exists on GitHub).

.github/workflows/ci.yml does a plain build check on every other branch/PR, no packaging.

The app checks this repo's Releases for updates on every startup (NetMonGui/Services/UpdateService.cs) — silently, and only when installed via Setup.exe (the portable exe and dotnet run are no-ops here, there's nothing to update in place). It's all best-effort: no network, GitHub rate limits, or no releases yet all fail silently rather than bothering you.

Security scanning

Since this is vibecoded (see the disclaimer up top) and I'm not a security professional, the repo runs GitHub's free automated checks on every push, all configured under .github/:

• CodeQL — static analysis for common vulnerability patterns (injection, unsafe deserialization, etc.), on every push/PR to main plus a weekly scheduled scan. Results show up under the repo's Security → Code scanning tab.
• Dependabot — weekly checks for known CVEs in NuGet packages and GitHub Actions versions, opens a PR automatically when one needs bumping. Results under Security → Dependabot.
• Secret scanning — GitHub's own, on by default for public repos, no config needed; flags anything that looks like a committed credential.

None of this is a substitute for a real audit, and none of it looks at the things that matter most here — like whether "click this button to have Windows change your route metric" or "restart elevated to read per-process ETW data" are things you're comfortable with an app doing. Read Adapter priority and Per-process bandwidth above and judge that part yourself.

Stream Deck plugin

streamdeck-plugin/ has an Elgato Stream Deck plugin that puts live ping or jitter for a chosen connection on a key, color-coded with the same thresholds as the app's charts. It talks to NetMonGui over a small loopback-only JSON API the app exposes automatically (NetMonGui/Services/StatsApiService.cs, http://127.0.0.1:47115/api/status) — no configuration needed on the app side, just have it running. See streamdeck-plugin/README.md for building and installing it.

Console version (netmon.ps1)

No install required — it's a single PowerShell script, and PowerShell ships with every Windows PC. Nothing to download, nothing to trust except this one file. No graph, no adapter-priority button — just the table, in a terminal.

Run it

Double-click Run-NetMon.bat, or from a terminal:

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File netmon.ps1

Press Ctrl+C to stop — it'll print a final summary table before exiting.

If you plug in a new connection (e.g. your iPhone hotspot) while it's running, it'll pick it up automatically within a few seconds. If you unplug one, it drops off the table (its stats are gone — this is a live monitor, not a logger).

How it works

For each active, non-virtual network adapter (VPNs, Hyper-V, loopback etc. are skipped automatically), it sends one ICMP ping per second sourced from that adapter's IP (ping -S <adapter-ip> <target>), so the Ethernet ping and the hotspot ping are truly independent — both really travel over their own physical link, not just whichever route Windows would pick by default. It's a single 32-byte packet per second per connection — negligible bandwidth, won't affect your game.

Jitter is the average difference between consecutive pings (the standard definition used by most game/network tools) — this tends to matter more than raw ping for shooters/MOBAs, since it's what causes rubber-banding and inconsistent hit registration even when average ping looks fine.

Options

powershell -File netmon.ps1 [-Target <ip>] [-IntervalMs 1000] [-TimeoutMs 1000] [-RediscoverEverySec 5]

• -Target — what to ping. Defaults to 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare, reliable and low-latency almost everywhere). You can point it at any IP — e.g. a specific game server IP if you can find one in your game's network diagnostics, for a more direct comparison.
• -IntervalMs / -TimeoutMs — how often to ping and how long to wait for a reply.
• -MaxIterations — stop automatically after N ticks (handy for a timed test, e.g. -MaxIterations 300 for a ~5 minute run with -IntervalMs 1000).

Sharing with friends

Just send them the whole folder (or zip it): netmon.ps1, Run-NetMon.bat, this README. They double-click Run-NetMon.bat — no Python, no .NET, no install. Works on any Windows PC.

Or just point them at the Releases page.