Requirements

Before you set up PeakHour on your Mac, make sure you have the following.

Your Mac

• A Mac running macOS 14.6 Sonoma or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel.
• PeakHour 6 is distributed exclusively through the Mac App Store — install or update it from there.
• An internet connection (Wi-Fi, Ethernet or USB tethering). PeakHour can monitor your local network without internet access, but it needs internet on first launch to validate your Mac App Store receipt.

Your Network

To monitor throughput, your router or device must support at least one of:

• SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) v1, v2c, or v3.
• UPnP supporting Internet Gateway Device (IGD) v1.0 or v2.0.

Most consumer routers support UPnP out of the box, though it’s often disabled by default — see First Time Setup → Prerequisites. SNMP is more common on prosumer and enterprise hardware.

Both protocols are optional — PeakHour will still run without them, but you won’t be able to monitor your router’s throughput.

Latency and latency monitoring

To measure latency, jitter, and traceroute paths to the internet, your Mac must be able to send and receive ICMP packets (used by ping and traceroute). Some restrictive networks or VPNs block ICMP — if PeakHour can’t reach internet hosts, check your firewall or VPN configuration.

Some ISPs block traceroute. PeakHour then can’t find your ISP’s router, but the sites on the internet still answer. The PeakHour Advisor shows the ISP link as Not measured, and PeakHour sends no false Internet appears to be down notification.

PeakHour Advisor

The PeakHour Advisor window needs macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later. To ask questions about your connection with Private Cloud Compute, you need macOS 27 or later with Apple Intelligence.