Looking for a good Home Network Monitor

[Retrowire]

I'm looking for something free that doesn't require me to alter the firmware on my router.

I'm only looking for something that can give me the data usage on individual devices in my house. We have several computers, smartphones, one tablet and 3 game consoles and I'm trying to keep an eye on how much data each console uses at the moment.

Any help is appreciated and thank you for your time.

 

[CaedenV]

the best/simplest way to do this is to use the tools provided by your router, or to flash your current router with an OS that does have the tools you are looking for. Old Linksys WRT54G* routers could be flashed with DDWRT or TomatoOS, and many newer ASUS routers are capable of this as well, though most ASUS routers have these features built in now.

Outside of that you would have to forward all of your network traffic through a PC with some form of server OS like Clark Connect or FreeNAS. While technically cheaper, there is a steep learning curve on how to do this properly, and depending on your current router it is probably not possible to do in the first place.

Hope that helps!

 

[Retrowire]

the best/simplest way to do this is to use the tools provided by your router, or to flash your current router with an OS that does have the tools you are looking for. Old Linksys WRT54G* routers could be flashed with DDWRT or TomatoOS, and many newer ASUS routers are capable of this as well, though most ASUS routers have these features built in now.

Outside of that you would have to forward all of your network traffic through a PC with some form of server OS like Clark Connect or FreeNAS. While technically cheaper, there is a steep learning curve on how to do this properly, and depending on your current router it is probably not possible to do in the first place.

Hope that helps!

I appreciate the suggestions but I really don't want to flash the routers OS. Thank you though.

 

[bill001g]

If you are not willing to load dd-wrt then there are no consumer routers that can do what you want. Even with dd-wrt all it does is export the data using rflow to pc to analyst it. It not like any router has a hard drive it can store usage data on.

Your only option if you just want a preinstalled OS is to buy a commercial router. cisco or juniper have netflow and jflow respectively.

 

[Saga Lout]

I think something as simple as NetMeter would do the trick here. You need to download on to each PC to see what the individual throughputs are. Google for it and make your choice of download sites - my preference for security would be CNet.