Vitals For Mac

Activity Monitor can show each process’s current resource usage and total CPU usage over time, but it lacks a combination of the two — a graph of each individual application’s activity over a certain period of time.

That’s exactly what Vitals is meant to offer. It’s a small menu bar app that lets you track resource consumption for all active processes over the last sixty seconds. It can be helpful for troubleshooting, and it’s very simple to use.

The app monitors CPU, memory, and network usage across all running processes, and the twenty most active ones are listed in the UI, which can be brought up by just clicking the menu bar icon. Data is shown for the last sixty seconds, which should be enough to spot any unusual activity.

To switch between CPU, memory, and network information, you just need to click the arrows in the top-right corner of the window. Network statistics can be disabled if you prefer, which will make it easier to cycle through CPU and memory readings.

Activity Monitor is normally all you need, but if your Mac suddenly starts stuttering, any unusual CPU usage might go back to normal by the time you start up the utility, and there is no record of an individual process’s resource consumption.

Vitals lets you spot this kind of behavior with just one click in the menu bar, and even if you don’t catch the process in the act, you will have a visual record of a usage spike for up to sixty seconds.

The app works well, and it comes in a very tiny package. The UI itself is similarly minimalistic, and there are no configuration options other than enabling or disabling network statistics. If you need to track down a misbehaving process, it should be right tool for the job.