Ask HN: How do you monitor your home network usage? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you monitor your home network usage?

3 pointsnycdatasci4 comments

With Comcast's new policy to raise rates for heavy internet users, I'd like to understand my family's usage patterns better. Does anyone have experience with appliances like Firewalla as a monitoring solution? Monitoring, security, and centralized ad control are all appealing.

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I break up the home network into multiple cidr blocks and have corresponding iptables rules for them on my router. My router is just running Linux. IPTables counters show me bandwidth up and down for each subnet. Each family member has their own subnet and outbound snat. I reset the counters monthly. This is just for info now, as I spent about 45 minutes with their call center negotiating a new plan that does not include that ridiculous cap. You can also pay them an extra fee per month to avoid the cap if you know you will be going over it and don't want to negotiate plans with them.

If your router supports having OpenWRT [1] installed, you can monitor bandwidth with bwmon.

[1] - https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/network_monitor...

Thanks! This is very helpful. I don't have a good sense for network utilization, but consume and post 4k content regularly. I will take a look at OpenWRT.

I forgot to add, if it's as simple as knowing the total bandwidth used, you can just log into Comcast and they will show you your usage. I believe it is accurate within a day, so don't assume they counted all the data you used that same day. The methods I mentioned are more useful if you want to know who or what (IoT) in your household is being the bandwidth hog. :-)

Thanks. I'm definitely looking for device x domain granularity at minimum. It looks like there a variety of monitoring options with OpenWRT (https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/services/network_monitor...) but I will likely just go with Firewalla initially as a plug-and-play solution.

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