Monitoring your home network

With more home devices (like washing machines, televisions, and even toys) requiring access to your home WiFi account or other network connection it is important to understand why they need this access and how to monitor it.

Monitoring network traffic is not only for large businesses, it is something smaller networks can do as well: we can even do it at home!  Monitoring your family home network or small business network traffic has a lot of benefits and can reveal surprising results.

You can monitor many things like:

Check to see if there are any unwanted packets being sent or received from your network.  These could include someone you do not want on the network (for example, a hacker) or even an application or computer program that should not be using network traffic.

Monitor how often a program uses your network.  For example, how often does Windows check for updates?  Or, is someone else using your WiFi?

Find out what program (or even individual) is taking up all of your network traffic and slowing down your network broadband.

There are many free applications out there like Wire Shark or Splunk.  Home Monitor is an application built on Splunk that allows any user to view the network traffic moving through their home router.  This application takes the syslog feed from your router and breaks it out into ports, IP addresses and locations based on IP addresses.