Broadband Usage - How to Measure?

wizzer

Is there anyway I can measure usage from multiple PC's, PS4, iphone etc in my house?

I am on Virgin Media ADSL and have a Netgear Router but this doesn't provide any usage stats.

I think the answer is probably not from looking but just in case anyone knows different.

Thanks

securityguy

It's not easy. I maintain usage figures from some of the machines in the house using an SNMP agent on the machines and "cacti" network management. But won't help on things that don't have SNMP, like phones and televisions. I've played with maintaining a rough idea of usage with netflow and ntop, but that's not going to work for most people (aside from anything, routers which support netflow are hardly commodity).

kwikbreaks

With so many wireless devices these days the only practical way is to measure usage at the router. I'm 99% sure that the VM Superhub won't support SNMP. It may show some usage figures.

All VM products are unlimited sfaik although high usage may get your speed throttled back for a while. There are a number of tools that will measure usage by PCs (ThinkBroadBand do one + tools like networx will combine usage by monitored PCs on the home network - that may be close enough if you don't use many streaming devices.

Armorica

I swapped to a nice ASUS router - it includes usage stats and lets me change the router wide DNS settings so I can use OpenDNS to limit what the kids can get up to. The VM router also didn't like too many devices - the last few devices (kids hudls didn't connect).

https://www.softperfect.com/products/networx/ I've not used this one myself, but it implies it is freeware and can monitor at the router level