NetWatch

A tiny macOS menu bar app that alerts you when your internet connection drops and when it comes back — with a sound and a notification.

• 🟢 Connected
• 🔴 Disconnected
• 🟠 Unstable — the connection keeps flapping (dropping in and out)
• 🟡 High latency — still online, but slow to respond

Connectivity is checked against several targets (Cloudflare, Google, Quad9), so a single provider being down won't trigger a false alarm. Every drop and recovery is logged to ~/Library/Logs/NetWatch.log — open it from the menu via Open log. The menu also shows the current latency and the duration of the last outage.

Setup

From the project folder:

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Run

python3 netwatch.py

Settings

Edit the constants near the top of netwatch.py:

Setting	Default	Meaning
CHECK_INTERVAL	1	Seconds between checks
FAIL_THRESHOLD	2	Consecutive failures before "disconnected" (debounce)
OK_THRESHOLD	1	Consecutive successes before "connected"
PROBE_TARGETS	Cloudflare/Google/Quad9	Hosts tried in order; offline only if all fail
LATENCY_WARN_MS	300	Connect slower than this → 🟡 high latency
LATENCY_WARN_COUNT	2	Consecutive slow readings before showing 🟡
FLAP_WINDOW	60	Seconds window used to detect flapping
FLAP_THRESHOLD	3	Transitions within the window → 🟠 unstable

Sound

The alert sound is assets/ping.mp3. To change it, replace that file (keep the same name), or edit SOUND_PATH in netwatch.py.

Version

• 1.1.3 - change the offline icon back.
• 1.1.0 — multiple probe targets, outage duration on reconnect, and an outage log. Also fixed some issue :D
• 1.0.2 — faster disconnect detection; debounce 🟡 so it no longer flashes at cutoff.
• 1.0.1 — add 🟠 unstable (flapping) and 🟡 high-latency states.
• 1.0.0 — first release.