Questions and answers.
What ZenVizor is, what it is not, and the honest limits.
About
What is ZenVizor?
A lightweight, passive network monitor for Windows. It tracks how much each program on your PC sends and receives, shows it in a near-live dashboard, keeps the history locally, and lets you open a report for any day.
What are the system requirements?
Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), administrator access to install, and about 150 MB of free space. ZenVizor settles to roughly 55 MB; the history grows slowly within the limits you set.
Where is the source code?
On GitHub, under the GPL-3.0-or-later license. The repository includes the full spec, the phased build plan with its acceptance checks, the security limits document, the design system, and the installer scripts.
Install and security
Why does it need administrator access to install?
Because reading network activity from Windows and writing to the protected history database both require it. The installer sets up a background service for that work; the dashboard you actually use runs as your normal account, with no elevation.
Is the installer safe? Why does Windows warn about it?
SmartScreen warns about installers that are not signed with a certificate it already trusts. ZenVizor's installer is not signed yet and the publisher is new, so the warning is expected rather than a sign of trouble. Click More info, then Run anyway. If you would rather verify first, the download page shows how to check the file's fingerprint against the published value.
How do I check the installer I downloaded?
Compare the installer's fingerprint to the value in SHA256SUMS.txt on the release page. In PowerShell: Get-FileHash .\ZenVizorSetup.exe -Algorithm SHA256. The two should match.
How do I uninstall ZenVizor?
Open Settings, go to Apps, find ZenVizor, and click Uninstall. That removes the service, the app, the dashboard, and its shortcut. Your history is kept by default, so a later reinstall picks up where you left off. To erase the history during uninstall, run the installer from an elevated PowerShell with a flag: .\ZenVizorSetup.exe /uninstall REMOVE_DATA=1 /quiet. The shared .NET runtime stays behind either way; remove it through Windows Settings if nothing else needs it.
Privacy and AI
Does ZenVizor send my data anywhere?
No. It is a local app with no account, no sync, and no tracking of any kind. It sends nothing of its own over the network. That is a firm rule in the code, and every release it is checked by pointing ZenVizor at itself and confirming it reports zero traffic from its own parts.
What is the background service for?
It is the only part that reads the network feed and the only part that owns the history database. The dashboard never touches the database directly; it asks the service over a private local channel, not a network connection. Nothing slips past the service to reach your data.
Does ZenVizor use AI?
Not in the app you install. There is no model, nothing running AI inside it, and nothing that calls out to a service. AI did help build it: the code was written with Claude Code, directed and checked at every step by a person. It is a tool that helped make the product, not a part of the product. Because the source is open, you can confirm that yourself.
Coverage and limits
Honest limit What can ZenVizor not do?
It only watches; it does not block, slow down, or filter anything. For that, use Windows Defender Firewall or your router. It also cannot look inside one program to separate out code running within it. If something injects itself into a normal program, or runs through a Windows helper like rundll32 or regsvr32, its traffic shows up under that host program, because that is where the actual network connection lives. And when one shared svchost.exe process is running several Windows services at once, ZenVizor lists all of them and reports the process's total; it will not guess at how to split the bytes between them. Two kinds of traffic are left out by design: anything that no program on your machine actually owns, such as port scans or unsolicited attempts to reach a closed port (there is no program to credit it to), and ICMP traffic, including ping, which ZenVizor does not capture at all.
Honest limit What does ZenVizor see for browsers that use encrypted DNS (DoH)?
More than you might expect. Many browsers now look up websites over encrypted DNS, which skips the normal Windows lookup that older monitors rely on. ZenVizor handles this a second way: it reads the destination website name from the start of each connection (the unencrypted part of the handshake that names where you are going), so for most traffic, including modern QUIC connections to sites like YouTube, you still see real website names rather than bare IP addresses. It does this purely by observing, never by intercepting your data or sending anything itself. One narrow case still shows only an IP address: connections using the newest standard, Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), which hides even the website name. Reading it would mean actively probing the connection, and ZenVizor's first rule is to stay silent, so it does not. When this happens, the app tells you so right where the connection is shown.
chrome.exe
youtube.com
chrome.exe
162.159.61.3
Encrypted Client Hello, name hidden