Parents can keep an eye themselves on the children while they are using the internet but it may not be possible for that to happen every time.Ī better alternative is to install a good Home Network Monitoring system on the computer. Internet has become important for children too but along with comes the headache of the parents to keep their children’s browsing safe.Ī lot of matter available on the internet is inappropriate for children and most of the websites do not take sufficient measures so as to make it restricted for children. Nothing can be more important for the parents than to protect their children from the malicious activities in the outer world. But the dynamic and open nature of the internet has made it one of the most problematic tools ever which in turn makes the concept of Home Network Monitoring a vital task. Even a few days off the internet can be really difficult for many. Internet has become one of the most influencing factors on one’s life. Computer network can be of any form – MAN (Metropolitan Area Network), WAN (Wide Area Network), LAN (Local Area Network), intranet and the most important of all, Internet.

Now the monitoring data from ntopng can can be exported to Grafana.The size and usage of computer network is ever increasing. This will keep the monitored traffic separate from the monitoring traffic. Accessing the Monitoring resultĪs the Gigabit port of the Pi is used to receive mirrored traffic, the monitoring dashboard is accessed over the wlan0 interface. I used the Rasbian image for the pi and Ntopng can be easily installed from their repository using apt. It can aggregate and produce nice traffic analysis summary. To monitor traffic over long time I used Ntop. These tools give a live view of the packets going through my home network. Once the traffic is available on the mirrored port, I was able to run traffic monitors like wireshark, tshark and tcpdump on the mirror port to analyze all the traffic between the router and ISP. All traffic monitoring happens on the Pi. The mirrored traffic is passed on to the Raspberry Pi. I used this to mirror traffic arriving through the router and the ISP connection. The NetGear GS105E switch provides the capability of port mirroring. The following figure shows the connectivity. To get around the problem I decided to put the traffic monitor on the WAN side of the router. This makes traffic monitoring a bit of a problem on the LAN side. As with most people I have very few devices that connect to the router over an Ethernet cable, most devices are wifi capable.

The router provides both wire and wifi connectivity.

I have a PPPoE connection to my ISP that connects to my home router.

So, I decided to do a weekend project to implement traffic analysis on my home network. I had the Raspberry Pi laying around for some time without doing any major function and so was the NetGear switch.

Home internet traffic monitoring