History View

The History view gives a more comprehensive perspective on a monitor’s data, letting you visualize bandwidth activity or connection quality for periods extending from the last few hours to years in the past.

Bandwidth Monitors, Latency Monitors and the Wi-Fi Signal monitor have a History view:

Opening the History view

There are two ways to open the History view for a monitor:

• Click the History button () in the graph toolbar above the monitor’s graph.
• If the graph isn’t visible, right-click the monitor and choose History… from the menu.

You can also click Browse History in the header of the Monitors section to get a menu of your monitors — choose one to open its History view. Once the window is open, use its sidebar to switch between monitors without reopening it. The sidebar groups the monitors by type, with a Metrics group for the Wi-Fi Signal monitor.

Reading the graph

Hover over any point on the graph to see the actual value at that moment. To inspect a span of time, drag-select a range — PeakHour shows the total (for usage) or the average (for speed) across the selected period.

• Hover detail — a tooltip showing the values at the point under the pointer. For a latency monitor this is the time, latency, and packet loss; for a bandwidth monitor it’s the time and the usage or speed.
• No data — a hatched region marks periods where no data was recorded, for example while PeakHour wasn’t running. For latency monitors, see Outages and downtime for how PeakHour tells these gaps apart from a genuine outage.
• Estimated — for bandwidth monitors, an Estimated tag indicates usage that PeakHour calculated by averaging the total data used between the time it stopped running and the time it started again, rather than measuring it directly.

Outages and downtime

When there’s a gap in a latency monitor’s history, PeakHour tries to tell the difference between a real outage — your connection was actually down — and simply not monitoring, such as when your Mac was asleep, the app was closed, or monitoring was paused. It only counts time as downtime when it has evidence the connection genuinely failed.

• Offline — a red band marks time PeakHour is confident the connection was down. The Offline 5h 30m total at the top of the window adds up every detected outage across the period you’re viewing.
• No data — a hatched band marks a gap where PeakHour can’t prove there was an outage, most often because your Mac was asleep or PeakHour wasn’t running. Rather than overstate things, PeakHour shows these as No data instead of downtime.
• Hover any band to see how long it lasted.

PeakHour counts a silent gap as a genuine outage when either of these is true:

• The connection was visibly failing — the checks taken just before or after the gap were almost entirely failing, with near-total packet loss as the link dropped and then went silent.
• Your Mac was clearly still online — another monitored target kept reporting normally during the same gap. If one target goes silent while others are still being checked, your Mac was awake and connected, so that target was genuinely unreachable.

If neither is true, the gap is shown as No data rather than downtime. A gap also has to last at least a couple of monitoring intervals before it’s labelled, so momentary blips don’t clutter the graph.

Wi-Fi Signal monitors

The History view of a Wi-Fi Signal monitor shows its three series in one graph: Tx Rate on the scale at the left, and SNR and Signal on the scale at the right. The right scale labels only its top and bottom values, in dB or dBm.

• The line of each series is its average in each period. The light band around it goes from its lowest to its highest value in that period.
• The legend has one capsule for each series, for example Tx Rate (Mb/s). Click a capsule to hide the series or show it again. One series always stays visible.
• Hover detail shows the time, then the average of each series, with its range, for example 433 Mb/s (390–520). A series with no data reads No data.
• No data — a hatched region marks a period with no Wi-Fi value, for example while your Mac was not on Wi-Fi, or asleep.

Export gives a CSV file with a Date column, then three columns for each series: its average, its minimum and its maximum, for example Signal Avg (dBm), Signal Min (dBm) and Signal Max (dBm). Each row is one period at the level of detail of the view. Dates are in UTC.

PeakHour keeps the Wi-Fi Signal history as it keeps the other history: every minute for 7 days, every hour for 90 days, and every day after that.

The toolbar

The toolbar along the top of the window controls the period being shown, the level of detail, and how the data is displayed.

From left to right:

Control	Description
Show / Hide Sidebar	Shows or hides the sidebar, which lists the monitors available to view in the History window.
Graph period	Sets the time range to display. Choose one of the presets, or select Choose Dates… to pick a custom start and end date. See Graph periods.
Level of detail	Sets how much time each point on the graph represents — for example, 5-minute intervals for 12 hours of data, or one-day intervals for several months. Higher detail over long periods can take a few seconds to calculate.
Usage / Speed	Toggles between the total amount of data used (Usage) and the average speed for each point (Speed). Bandwidth monitors only.
Stacked / Split	Shows inbound and outbound on the same axis (Stacked) or on separate axes (Split).
Refresh	Forces the graph to refresh.
Share	Shares a picture of the graph via Mail, Messages, AirDrop, etc.
Export	Exports the data currently shown to a CSV file.
Edit monitor	Opens settings for the monitor being shown.

The latency History view has the same toolbar without the Usage / Speed toggle, since latency monitors only show a single measurement type. The Wi-Fi Signal History view has neither Usage / Speed nor Stacked / Split.

Note

The view auto-refreshes about once a minute. If the graph takes a long time to render, auto-refresh is disabled automatically to avoid excessive CPU use. If the graph isn’t refreshing on its own, lower the level of detail or shorten the time period to speed up rendering and re-enable auto-refresh.

Graph periods

The Graph period menu has two groups of presets:

• Periods that end now: Last 6 Hours, Last 12 Hours, Last 24 Hours, Last 3 Days and Last 7 Days. Last 7 Days starts 7 days ago and includes today.
• Calendar periods: Today, Yesterday, This Week, Last Week, This Month, Last Month, Last 3 Months, Last 6 Months, Year to Date and Last Year. These start and end on calendar boundaries. Last Year is the previous calendar year.