If all internet traffic is going to pass through a device, it is good to use caution. This left only one approach: a Raspberry Pi network monitor. And packet sniffing is an interesting idea, but I wanted to be able to handle wired as well as wireless traffic. I could not install the necessary software on all the IOT devices, which prevents device reporting. I did not want to buy a new router, so router reporting was not an option. This is the same concept that allows attackers to sniff traffic on a WiFi network.Įach of these has its drawbacks.

You could theoretically monitor the wireless traffic (if all you care about is WiFi). It integrates well with Prometheus/Grafana though. The standard protocol for this is SNMP, which will rely upon device side installations to self-report. But generally custom firmware is required. Some modern routers provide features along these lines. Unfortunately, this can slow down the network, which causes many to avoid the approach ( see the next section). The Raspberry Pi sits between the devices to be tracked and the internet (e.g., acting as a router or access point). The obvious way to monitor network traffic. Skip to the end of this post for source code & installation.īut first, let’s consider the different ways to monitor traffic on a home network… Internet Traffic Monitor: Approachesīased upon experience and some research, these are the possibilities I came up with: There are Docker images for both arm and amd. While I used a Raspberry Pi, the code should run on any Linux distribution. The result was an open-source Python script / Docker container, meant to be run on a Raspberry Pi, that exports data to Prometheus. It seemed like a couple others on Reddit were also interested in a solution to this problem, so I decided to give it a try. This would let me see what sites the devices were contacting with the Raspberry Pi home network monitor. Ideally, I also wanted to create a beautiful Grafana dashboard. My goal was to not require any special software, yet monitor the internet traffic for every network device. So… who knows where the traffic is going? Plus, we have many home-made IOT devices scattered around the house. There internet providers out here advertise about 30 Mbps (down) and 2 Mbps (up). This project came about when retrofitting our cabin in the woods to a smart-home.

This open-source solution has been used by readers of this site for monitoring family internet usage, LAN parties, and more. This post will show you how to monitor all internet traffic for every device on your network, without buying any specialty hardware. Instead, I tried to build a custom Raspberry Pi network monitor.

Many solutions to this problem require software to be installed on every device to be monitored. When trying to figure out why the internet is slow, it can be hard to learn exactly which device on the network is eating up all the bandwidth.

Raspberry pi fritz box traffic monitor