BarographSupportDownload

A quiet instrument
for a busy Mac.

Barograph lives in your menu bar, records the last 24 hours, and tells you in plain words why your fans spun up at 3am.

Download for MacSee how it works
CPU while idle
0.29%
Memory footprint
18MB
Idle wakeups
0
History at 10 s
24h
History uploaded
0bytes

Measured on an M2 Max with macOS 27: Release build, one menu bar item, ten minutes after launch. Idle wakeups as reported by top.

Glance, peek, dive.
One instrument at three zoom levels.

Glance at the menu bar

Five drawn styles with fixed widths, so nothing jitters. Monochrome until a value needs you.

Peek with one click

The last minute, the numbers that matter, and the five busiest processes. It samples only while open.

Dive into the window

Every instrument in depth, from pressure to per-core heat. Press ⌘K to jump anywhere.

Widgets on your desktop

A Metric widget and an Overview, each with the last hour as a sparkline.

Ask Siri or Spotlight

“Why is my Mac slow in Barograph” gets the same plain answer the window gives.

Your Mac's flight recorder.
Scroll back to 3am, and see why.

01

Record

Turn on History and Barograph keeps the last 24 hours at 10-second resolution, with a mark for every throttle, sleep, and charger change. Drag across the line.

Last 24 hours · CPU loadDrag across the line, or choose a mark
03:10Throttling

Fans are at 4800 rpm because Xcode has used 400% CPU for 6 minutes and the chip is throttling.

Unusual CPU

“CPU is at 85%, well above its usual 12%. Most of it comes from ffmpeg (310%) and Safari (90%).”

EWMA baseline and z-score

Fans and throttling

“Fans are at 4800 rpm because Xcode has used 400% CPU for 6 minutes and the chip is throttling.”

Frequency under load vs. thermal state

02

Explain

Barograph joins per-process activity with chip power and thermal state, and writes what it finds in one sentence. Computed on your Mac. A clause with no data is left out, never guessed.

03

Alert

Rules for CPU, memory pressure, and battery, with optional notifications. Notifications never name a process.

04

Connect

An optional Prometheus and JSON endpoint for Grafana, Home Assistant, or a script. Off by default, and it answers only this Mac.

Eight instruments,
built for Apple silicon all the way down.

  • CPU

    P- and E-clusters apart, every core in a heat strip

  • GPU & Neural Engine

    Activity, frequency, and power from the chip

  • Memory

    Pressure first, then app, wired, and compressed

  • Disk

    Reads, writes, and the room that's left

  • Network

    Down and up per interface, tunnels left out of totals

  • Sensors

    Temperatures and fans, mapped per chip

  • Battery & Power

    Charge, system power, and thermal pressure

  • Processes

    A sortable table, found from ⌘K

A flight recorder
that never phones home.

Read the privacy policy
  • No sign-in, no cloud
  • No analytics or crash SDKs
  • No password, no helper tool
  • Readings, history, and insights stay on this Mac
  • Process names reach disk only if you turn that on
  • Update checks are the only connection, and send nothing about your Mac
  • The metrics endpoint is off by default and answers only this Mac
  • History keeps 24 hours and prunes itself
  • Delete History in Settings removes all of it

Recently
shipped

1.0

Next time your fans spin up,
you'll know why.

Download for MacRead the FAQ

Version 1.0 · Free · Apple silicon · macOS 14 or later