# Vitals now keeps a year of history and exports it as CSV By Atta Ur Rehman Shah (https://attacomsian.com/about). Published Oct 12, 2026. Topics: Product Update. Canonical URL: https://attacomsian.com/blog/vitals-year-of-history-csv-export > Vitals 1.6 keeps up to a year of history, shows when your Mac was at its limits, exports everything as CSV, and lets you set a limit of your own for one app. **[Vitals](https://vitalsmac.com)** 1.6 is out. It is about the past: how far back Vitals remembers, when your Mac was at its limits, and how you get the numbers out. If you missed the launch, Vitals is an Activity Monitor alternative for Mac. It groups every process under the app it belongs to, so you see about 60 apps instead of 1,000 processes. I wrote about [why I built it](https://attacomsian.com/blog/vitals) when it came out. ## A year of history Vitals kept 30 days of what your Mac and each app used. Now you choose **30 Days**, **90 Days**, **6 Months** or **1 Year**, under **Keep History For** in **Settings → General**. Over Time on the Overview goes back as far as you keep. A year takes about 30 MB on your Mac. The 30 days Vitals already had are kept, so nothing starts over. ## Export your history as CSV CSV export was on the first roadmap I published. Click **Export CSV** beside the range menu in Over Time, and Vitals saves a folder in Downloads with three files: - Your apps by day - Your Mac by hour - The readings every five minutes The same button is in the toolbar's **Export** menu, in **File → Export History as CSV**, and in **Settings → General**. The files hold app names and numbers only. Times are in your Mac's own time zone and numbers use a decimal point, so they open the same in Numbers, Excel or any spreadsheet. ## Peaks: when your Mac was at its limits The chart in Over Time shows averages, and an average hides the ten minutes your Mac ran flat out. A new **Peaks** card under it shows the highest CPU, memory pressure, temperature and power in the time you chose, and when each was. Under **At a Limit** are the stretches your Mac spent at a limit, each with its start, its end and what it was. A limit is CPU or GPU at 90% or more, memory under pressure, the temperature you set, or macOS slowing the Mac down to cool it. The card fills from the day you update, because the readings behind it start with 1.6. ## A limit of your own for one app Vitals already tells you when any app keeps the CPU busy or grows in memory. Now you can set a limit for one app in particular: a browser above 8 GB, or an editor above 200% CPU, for the minutes you choose. Open **Settings → Insights** and click **Add a Limit for an App**. Or right-click an app anywhere in Vitals and choose **Alert When…**. Some apps are meant to be busy. Right-click one and choose **Don't Alert About**, until tomorrow or always, and Vitals stays quiet about it. ## Smaller things - **The dropdown says what is under strain.** When a reading in the menu bar turns red, the dropdown now says which reading, the limit it crossed and for how long. A customer asked for this after 1.5. - **Your history is a file you can open.** Everything Vitals records is one file on your Mac. The tables and a few queries to start from are on [the history data page](https://vitalsmac.com/history-data). - **Ask your assistant about the past.** If you let Claude, Codex or Cursor ask Vitals, they can now ask about the past too: when your Mac was at a limit this week, or which apps used the most memory over the last 90 days. ## How to get it All of this is in Vitals 1.6 and later. There is a [page for this release](https://vitalsmac.com/changelog/1.6) with pictures of the Peaks card and the new limits. The update is free for everyone who owns Vitals. Vitals offers it the next time it checks for updates. New to Vitals? [Get it for Mac](https://vitalsmac.com/#pricing). What comes next is on the [roadmap](https://vitalsmac.com/roadmap). If something is missing from it, [email me](mailto:hi@vitalsmac.com).