In Silent Mode you finally turn the tables: From now on you won’t miss a single connection attempt of your Mac. Just sit back and watch what was formerly going on unnoticed. You can decide later what you want to allow – and what to deny.

In the Network Monitor you will find a lot of information about every server your computer has been in contact with. This information helps you to decide whether you want to allow or deny similar connections in the future.

In Network Monitor you can see and analyze all the network activity of your computer. Furthermore, you can easily and intuitively decide which connections to allow and which to deny.

The Little Snitch Rules Window lists all the rules, no matter when and how you created them. It’s the right place to comfortably check, edit, and delete them. Or even add some new ones.

When you look at your rules, you will see that some of them (seemingly) contradict each other. But Little Snitch uses a hierarchy of rules, so you can easily predict which rule takes precedence over another. Let’s look at an example. Say you want to use Chat.app, a popular app with a shady reputation, so you create a general rule to deny connections to any server. But this will render the app useless, so you’ll need a second, more specific rule which allows connections to the chat.com domain.

Now Little Snitch shows you that Chat.app also connects to a server named statistics.chat.com, something you definitely don’t want. Another, even more specific rule will deny this connection. Sounds complicated? Actually it isn’t. Just give it a try and then open the Rules Window. You will find that all the rules are already sorted according to their priority.

Little Snitch’s Rules Window comes with a handy feature to show all rules applying to a single app. Perform a right-click on the app and choose “Focus on Rules Affecting [app]”.

You will find the search box right above the rules in the Little Snitch Rules Window. Type in some search term to filter all your rules. Let’s try this: Type in “Deny” and you will find a list of all the rules denying Internet access.

Everybody has experienced this: You want to open a service on the Internet and it just doesn’t work. Sometimes the server is down or busy, sometimes you are not connected to the Internet at all.

When you have ruled out those reasons, you should look into you Little Snitch Network Monitor. You will find a couple of very helpful search features to support your inquiry.

In most cases, apps contact online services directly. But sometimes they use an extra helper process which is created by the app.

In the first case it’s easy to identify a connection problem. But if an app uses a helper process, you might not be able to link the name or icon of the process to the app which is affected by the problems. You will have to use the search features of Network Monitor to find out, which process causes the problems.

In the following examples, we will show you how to solve rule-related problems.

Just change the responsible rule by clicking the allow icon. Your browser should now be able to access twitter.com. Just give it a try!

Assume that you are trying to manually update your browser. But every time you click the “Check for Updates” button you get an error message telling you that the “Update failed”.

A quick check reveals that no connections requested by Google Chrome are denied. It is possible that Google Chrome uses a helper process to look for updates on behalf of Google Chrome.

This helper process may have a different name than “Google Chrome” and a different icon. At first, it might be impossible for you to identify the right process.

The following steps demonstrate how to trace down such a process.

Just allow the connection by clicking on the allow icon. The helper process can now connect to the Internet and will finish update without further problems.