Monitor who is on my network

Still, it will definitely tell you everything you need to know. Wifi leeches will get the boot as soon as you lock down your router. Next, check for firmware updates. Then, the only devices that should be able to reconnect are ones you give the new password to. That should take care of anyone leeching your wifi and doing all their downloading on your network instead of theirs. If you can, you should also take a few additional wireless security steps , like turning off remote administration or disabling UPnP.

For bad actors on your wired computers, you have some hunting to do. Worst case, you can always log back onto your router and block that suspicious IP address entirely. The owner of that set-top box or quietly plugged-in computer will come running pretty quickly when it stops working.

The bigger worry here, though, is compromised computers. Blow them away, reinstall, and restore from your backups. Rooting out suspicious devices or leeches on your network can be a long process, one that requires sleuthing and vigilance. Just remember to use your powers for good. This story was originally published in October and was updated in October with current information and resources. If you really have a problem with leeching, change your router's admin password and username if you are able to then use MAC address filtering to whitelist all of your devices.

Scroll down to Credentials for Windows systems or Mac and fill in the details. Just enter the computer name and the login from an admin account. This will allow PRTG to scan the device.

When you are done, click on Save. PRTG will scan the device again with the new credentials. In the list you will find the network card, you can recognize it by its name Intel …. We now have all the sensors for our home network, so we can start with creating a network map.

The network map will help you identify problems and monitor your network traffic within your network. Click on Maps in the top navigation bar and Add Map blue label on the right side. Set the map width on and height on This allows you to view the full map on a Full HD screen without scrolling. On the left side you will the devices we added to PRTG in the structure we created.

On the right side, you find all sort of icons. Adding a device to the map is pretty simple, select the sensor, device or group on the left side.

It will highlight blue, then find an icon, graph or table on the right side and drag it on the map. You can always change an icon by dragging a new icon over it.

I used Default Icons A on the map above for all the devices. The internet cloud can be found in Default Icons B these are icons without sensors. The graphs are 2 days small fonts graphs. You can connect the device by dragging the blue line to another icon. If you want to use graphs as I did in a network map, then you might want to clean up the network sensors.

On my notebook, for example, I had more than 15 channels on the network card sensor. All were displayed in the graph, making it harder to read. We only need the traffic in and traffic out channels. Do this for all channels, except the traffic in and out channels. Normal PRTG graphs will stack the lines of the in and out traffic, making it harder to read. What you can do is change this behaviour to show the outgoing traffic as a negative area in the graph. Go to the settings of the network card and scroll down to Sensor Display.

If you have PRTG running you can use it to check the bandwidth usage per computer. Because we are monitoring every device, we have a good overview of who is using the most bandwidth on our network. There are some limitations with PRTG, you can read how much bandwidth your access point is using, but each individual wifi device mobile is a bit harder. We need to get the historical data from the computer to examine how much bandwidth is used.

You can do this as follows:. A new page will open with the results. But you can see here the amount of data I used. This will make it easier to read. An important part of monitoring is set up alerts. PRTG will send you an alert when a device is down, but you also need to set some limits. Like, alert me when Computer X has used 50Gb of data. Before we can send notification we first need to configure the mail service in PRTG. So we are going to use an SMTP server this.

I am going to use the SMTP server from Gmail, but you can also use the one of your provider for this. Fill in the following details:. To use Gmail, you will need to change a setting in your Google Account to allow other apps to send mail. Then select the tab Notification Templates.

Click on the edit icon and then click on the bell icon to test the notification:. You can create al kinds notifications, but we want to monitor our network traffic. So we are going to set an alert when a computer is using more than 50Gb of data within a month.

You can create more rule like this, for example, to send a warning when a computer has reach 40Gbyte of data. With PRTG you can really easy monitor your home network. It will not only show you the amount of bandwidth a device has used, but also the amount of space left on the hard drives, if devices are up or any other problem within your network. Thank you for this article. My internet keeps dropping many, many times per day. Not just on one device, but on all devices simultaneously.

My ISP has sent techs and supervisors to my house at least eight times over the past six months. Every cable, every connection, has been replaced inside and outside my house, yet, this keeps happening. Even the modem and router both supplied by the ISP have been replaced twice each! This will last anywhere from 10 seconds to five minutes, then all is well for a while, then it happens again. Yesterday, during my eight hour work-from-home shift, I counted eleven times this happened.

Lots of information for one simple question: Once I get this program downloaded, installed, and follow your setup instructions, what, exactly, will I be looking for that I can show my ISP the next time they send a tech or supervisor out? You want to add ping sensors to your modem and router.

This way you can record the exact time of the connection drop and it might show you that you are able to reach your router or even modem. If you can successfully ping your modem during an outage, then the problem is outside your home network. Also, create a ping sensor and let it ping Google 8. This way you will see the internet outage and you can compare it with the other ping sensors.

Have you already tried using a different DNS server? But I can Google it or look for a video on YouTube to find out. In other places, Capsa marks the traffic for you. You can organize this information differently, too. The analysis toolbar shows all incoming and outgoing connections for the localhost, its geographic endpoint, and more. The Node 2 column can make for interesting reading! But for the most part, these limitations shouldn't affect your ability to figure out what is stealing your bandwidth.

Download: Capsa for Windows Free. The other possibility is that your bandwidth issues aren't coming from your local network. You may well have picked up some nasty malware that is stealing your bandwidth as it communicates with an external server or acts as a spam email bot. Malware can consume your malware in numerous ways, although it isn't always "all-consuming.

You should have an antivirus suite installed. Run a full system scan with whichever antivirus you use. Furthermore, I would strongly advise downloading Malwarebytes and running a full system scan.

Quarantine and remove any nefarious items the full system scan brings to light. Then, check if your bandwidth increases. You might notice a sudden boost in speed! Another way to hone in on system processes hogging your bandwidth is through the Command Prompt and the netstat command. This utility is useful, especially when testing more complex network elements, like firewall rules, load balancers, and alert trigger conditions.

The Generator console, as with NetFlow Replicator, is easy to use. You can then add endpoints. The Configurator lets you establish a router, from which you can send NetFlow records to the collector.

This utility first asks you to input device information and credentials, including IP address or hostname; choose the SNMP version v1, v2, or v3 ; and establish the community string i. The next stage asks for destination details, including IP address or hostname and port. You can then apply these conditions, and a summary is generated.

For a free tool, SolarWinds Flow Tool Bundle is excellent for helping you get ahead of a problem before it affects performance. It cannot detect network performance issues, diagnose them, or resolve them. It cannot track availability, response time, or uptime of switches, routers, and other SNMP-enabled hardware.

ManageEngine is a big-name competitor in the field of network software development, and OpManager is one of its most popular products. OpManager is not just a LAN monitor. It monitors routers, switches, load balancers, firewalls, wireless LAN controllers, virtual machines VMs , servers, storage devices, printers, and more. This tool also offers both physical and virtual monitoring of Windows and Linux servers, and the performance of VMs and host computers powered by VMware, Hyper-V, and Xen platforms.

Essentially, anything and everything with an IP and connected to the network can be monitored. To undertake this monitoring, OpManager uses more than 2, built-in monitors for network performance, covering pretty much everything you could imagine. With WAN link monitoring, you can stay on top of key metrics like jitter, RTT, and packet loss, even viewing hop-by-hop performance to more quickly identify the root cause of latency.

I also appreciate the OpManager alerts system, which allows you to establish multi-level thresholds. These thresholds can be associated with a single device or applied across multiple devices.

Notifications are delivered by SMS, email, or both, but you can also configure OpManager to run external programs or homemade scripts automatically when an alert is triggered.

OpManager lets you customize your dashboard with over performance widgets, which can be arranged according to your taste and priorities.

This gives you a rapid, at-a-glance perspective on your network. The console features a map of your network, giving you a constant overview of its status. This is informed by the auto-discovery utility, which finds all the devices on your network.

Besides maps, other graphical representations are available, including charts and dials. Each of the graphs is color-coded, making it easy to interpret. For further detail, just click on the graph and it will expand in size to give you a better view.

OpManager is primarily a paid tool, but it does offer a free version to monitor up to 10 devices. However, if you want to get a taste for OpManager without downloading the free trial, you might give the free version a shot.

There are two OpManager plans available besides the free one: Professional and Enterprise. With the Professional version, you can manage up to 1, nodes. With Enterprise, you can manage up to 10, nodes. Both options can also monitor WAN and voice systems, using QoS utilities and remote monitoring functionalities to do so.

If you want to try the Professional or Enterprise versions of OpManager, a free trial of each is available. AppNeta takes a four-dimensional approach to monitoring by combining active and passive strategies for collecting data, to create an actionable understanding of your network.

AppNeta provides insight into private cloud deployments, public cloud infrastructure, and remote sites. The LAN monitoring utilities offered by AppNeta combine delivery path monitoring with application identification and the analysis of traffic. The tool proactively identifies congestion issues and high retransmit rates to give you a clear overview of how network performance might be degrading.

This proactive approach means if an issue arises, a deep network path diagnostics process is initiated, and an SNMP device poll is triggered. The results of this process will give you a detailed and comprehensive understanding of the problem, so you can identify and treat the root cause. To achieve a truly healthy network, you need a tool to provide as much detail as possible, with the aim of rooting out the origin of a problem.

With this program, you can monitor retransmit rate, throughput, latency of the network, and latency of applications for each host and user. While this tool certainly has a lot to offer, the dashboard could be improved.

You can request a customized trial version of AppNeta.