iStat Menus not working on Mac: what to check

"Not working" covers at least three unrelated problems. No icons at all, icons present but values blank, and values present but alerts or fan control doing nothing. They have different causes and different fixes, and working through settings screens without sorting the symptom first usually changes things that were never wrong.

Sorting takes about thirty seconds and narrows the search to one or two places. What follows is the sorting question, then the checks for each branch in the order that resolves the most cases soonest.

Sort the symptom into one of three buckets

Pick the line that matches what is on screen right now.

Nothing appears. No status items at all, or a category that used to be there has gone. In most cases the app is running correctly and there is no room to draw it.

Items appear but values do not. A readout is present and empty, or a history graph stays blank. This points at the component that reads the values, or at file permissions.

Values are fine but something does not act. Notifications never arrive, or fan speeds ignore the settings. This is usually a condition that was never met rather than a fault.

Mixing the branches is what makes troubleshooting drag. Missing temperatures will never be fixed by toggling login items. A machine that went quiet immediately after a macOS upgrade is almost always the login item branch, and running permission commands first wastes the effort.

Most often, it is running and there is no room for it

When no icons appear, suspect the menu bar before the app. The vendor's own help states the situation plainly:

On smaller screens, and in situations where there's a lot of menu bar items, macOS may hide some items. This is because the menu bar is full, and can not fit other items. In this situation, iStat Menus is running perfectly, but hidden from view. Source: bjango.com, checked 2026-09-10

On notched Macs the constraint is tighter than the screen width suggests. Items that cannot fit to the right of the notch are hidden by macOS, and status items never appear on the left side of it. The usable region is the right segment only, which on a 14-inch machine with several apps resident fills quickly.

The test is direct. Hold ⌘ and drag some other app's menu bar icon off the bar to free width. If the missing readouts appear the moment space opens, nothing was ever broken. Most system items removed that way can be restored from the Control Center section of System Settings.

Recent macOS versions add one more place to look. Starting with macOS 26, applications must be permitted to show menu bar items under a dedicated control in System Settings, and an app that is running with items enabled but showing none is very likely waiting on that permission. The same behavior is documented by other menu bar resident tools, including the open source monitor Stats.

An empty item list is not a failure

When only some categories are missing, the cause is usually configuration rather than space.

Sensors, disks and power each have an "items in menu bar" area that decides what gets drawn. If that area is empty, that category shows nothing at all while the app runs normally. Open the relevant tab, look at the list, and use the + button to add what should be visible.

A specific disk or sensor that has vanished from the list has a different cause. Disks, sensors and network interfaces can each be hidden individually from within the dropdown menus, and hidden entries do not come back on their own. Each category has a reset for its filtering, reachable from the app's Stats menu: reset disk filtering, reset sensor filtering, reset network filtering.

Almost every report that starts with "this used to be visible and now it is not" resolves to one of those two, and neither requires reinstalling anything.

After a macOS upgrade, look at login items

A machine that stopped working right after moving to a new macOS release points at the login item registration. The documented first step is to open System Settings, then General, then Login Items, switch the iStat Menus entry off, and switch it back on.

One detail is easy to miss: there may be several entries with iStat Menus or Bjango in the name. Finding one and stopping there leaves the others in whatever state they were in. Read the whole list.

If toggling does not help, the next documented step resets the login items database from Terminal with sudo sfltool resetbtm, followed by a restart. That command affects the login item settings of every other app on the Mac, which is why it belongs after the toggle rather than before it. For diagnosis, sudo sfltool dumpbtm writes the database to a file that support can read.

Temperatures and fan speeds need a separate component

If sensor values specifically are empty, the cause is a missing helper. Reading temperatures, fan speeds and voltages requires a privileged component that ships separately, and without it those readouts stay blank while everything else works. The vendor publishes it as a download to install and run.

Where the app came from changes what is possible here. The Mac App Store build cannot control fan speeds at all, and it needs the helper to display some stats. Everything else is described as the full app. So on an App Store copy, absent fan control is expected behavior rather than a fault to chase.

Permissions, and the case of a relocated home folder

If the helper is installed and values are still missing, the next documented cause is folder permissions. Incorrect ownership or mode on ~/Library/LaunchAgents/ or ~/Library/Application Support/ can stop the components installing correctly. The published fix sets ownership back to the current user with chown and the mode to 755 with chmod, run one command at a time in Terminal.

A home folder that has been moved to an external drive needs an extra step. In that configuration launch agents may not load, and the app requires Full Disk Access to work correctly. The two executables to add live in ~/Library/Application Support/iStat Menus 7/, named iStat Menus Helper and iStat Menus Menubar. Add them under Privacy and Security, then Full Disk Access. Pressing ⇧⌘G in the file picker and pasting that path is the quickest route to them.

After granting access, press the play button to the left of the Global text inside the app to bring the components back up. Skipping that last step is a common reason the fix appears not to have taken.

Weather stuck asking for location, history graphs blank

Category-specific symptoms have category-specific fixes, and neither of these is solved by reinstalling.

Weather that keeps showing a "Request Location Access" button even though location access has already been granted is a known state. The documented fix is to open System Settings, Privacy and Security, Location Services, turn the switch off, then turn it back on. Auditing individual per-app settings before trying that is usually wasted effort.

History graphs that stay blank point at the history databases. The app offers Delete History Database under its Menu Bar menu, and that clears the condition. Past history is lost, and graphs redraw from newly collected samples. If graphs are still blank afterwards, that is the point at which contacting support is the documented next move.

Rules that never fire

The third bucket includes notifications that do not arrive. Before rewriting a rule, separate two possibilities: the rule never matched, or it matched and the notification was suppressed.

Suppression is checked outside the app, in the macOS notification settings for it, along with whether a Focus mode is filtering it. A Focus that has been on all week is a common and easily missed explanation for silence from every app, not just this one.

A rule that never matched is checked inside the app, by comparing the condition against what the readouts show. Rules can key on CPU, GPU, memory, disks, network, sensors, battery, power and weather, and many of them combine a threshold with a duration, such as usage above a level for longer than a set number of seconds. A short spike that crosses the threshold but not the duration produces nothing, correctly.

Weather-based rules deserve their own check, because they depend on the location branch above. If the weather item is still asking for location access, any rule built on weather has no data to evaluate and will stay quiet regardless of how it is configured.

Fan control: two conditions before touching settings

When fans ignore the configuration, check two things before opening any preference pane.

The first is the build, covered above: the Mac App Store version cannot control fan speeds.

The second is the hardware. On M3, M3 Pro, M3 Max, M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max Macs, fan control may not work correctly in situations where macOS has turned the fans off, and the vendor lists this among known issues with solutions under investigation. That is not a setting, and no amount of adjusting curves will change it.

If neither condition applies and control still does nothing, the problem is upstream: go back to the helper and permissions checks, because control cannot work on sensors that are not being read.

The order to escalate in

For anything still unresolved, the published sequence is worth following exactly, because each step is harder to undo than the one before it.

Reinstall first. The app offers Reinstall from its own menu, which replaces the resident components while leaving settings alone.

Uninstall second. The app offers Uninstall from its own menu, and it works even after a trial has expired. If the app was already dragged to the Trash by hand, the documented approach is to download it again and run the uninstaller, since the uninstaller is what removes the components that a Trash operation leaves behind.

Send logs third. Under the Diagnostics menu, Send Log Files packages what the app recorded about the failure. That is the artifact support asks for, so producing it early shortens the exchange.

Starting at uninstall skips the cheapest fix and costs a rebuild of every setting, usually without learning what was wrong.

What to change first

The most common entry point in this list was the first one: running fine, no room to draw. That condition returns every time another resident app is installed, so it is worth treating separately from any fault.

Three settings inside the app reduce the footprint: show fewer items, switch labels off so only figures remain, and use combined mode to merge several readouts into a single status item. The same help page also names menu bar management tools as an option, which is a fair signal that width is not a problem a monitor can solve on its own.

For a monitor in particular, what matters in a menu bar tool is whether a hidden icon can still be clicked without unfolding the bar, since these items exist to be opened and read. How it compares lays out how different tools handle hiding and which macOS versions they require, and Features covers splitting icons into permanently hidden and on-demand. Testing the behavior directly is quicker than reading about it, and Koffret can run alongside an existing setup.