User Guide

Service monitoring

Is it your network or is it them?

You can tell Network Weather to watch specific websites and services. It probes each one repeatedly and tracks how fast they respond — so when Zoom feels slow, you'll know whether it's your network or Zoom.

How it works

The app sends small probes to each service you add and records:

  • How long the probe takes, broken down step by step
  • Whether it's responding at all
  • What went wrong if it isn't (DNS error, connection refused, TLS failure, timeout)

Network Weather supports four probe types:

  • ICMP — basic ping
  • HTTP / HTTPS — full request, with TLS certificate inspection on HTTPS
  • TCP — raw socket connect, useful for non-HTTP services like SSH, SMTP, or game servers

Results show up in the Services segment on the Status tab.

Adding a service

  1. Open the main window and click the Status tab.
  2. Click the Services segment, then Add Service.
  3. Enter the full URL or host: https://zoom.us, https://your-vpn.example.com, or tcp://gameserver.example.com:25565.
  4. Give it a name you'll recognize: "Zoom", "Work VPN", "Minecraft Server".
  5. Click Save.

It starts probing immediately.

Heads up: today, monitored services persist across app restarts when configured via config.json, but the in-app Add Service dialog may need re-entry across restarts in some builds. Tracking on the Windows roadmap. When in doubt, set them in %LOCALAPPDATA%\NetworkWeather\config.json.

What's worth watching

  • Video calls: https://zoom.us, https://teams.microsoft.com
  • Cloud storage: https://drive.google.com, https://dropbox.com
  • Work: your company VPN endpoint, intranet, or SaaS apps
  • Games: https://store.steampowered.com (HTTP) or tcp://your-game-server:port
  • Anything you'd notice going down

Cloudflare comes pre-loaded as a baseline "is the internet working?" check.

Reading the results

Each service shows a response time with a color based on how it compares to its own baseline. Green is normal for that service, yellow is degraded, red is broken.

Click a service for the timing breakdown:

  • DNS — finding the server's address
  • TLS — setting up the secure connection (HTTPS only); shows certificate validity, expiry, and issuer
  • TTFB — Time To First Byte, when the server starts replying
  • Download — receiving the body

If one service is red but everything else is green, the problem is almost certainly on their end, not yours. The Status tab will not blame your network for an outage at the destination.

Editing or removing a service

Click the service in the Services segment and choose Edit or Remove. Edits take effect on the next probe cycle.

A few things to know

Don't go overboard. Five to ten services is plenty. Each one adds a small amount of background traffic.

For HTTPS, always include https:// in the URL. Just a domain name defaults to ICMP.

If one service has slow DNS while everything else is fine, the problem is usually with that service's DNS, not yours. The breakdown makes that obvious.

For TLS-monitored services, the app warns you about expiring certificates ahead of time — useful when you're watching your own properties.