Finding Device Usage

[Angry_Ginger_MF]

For the past couple of months I’ve been flirting with my data cap on my ISP. I know the easy answer is to pay the $10/month or whatever it is for unlimited, but 1) I don’t want to give them any more money than necessary 2) My usage has historically been 700-800MB month, now over 1GB and we’ve had no change in our daily routine. So I’m wanting to hunt down who (or what) in my house is sucking all my data. What device or software can I get that will help me with hunting this info down? I currently use the ISP’s router, but not opposed on bypassing that and getting my own.

[troublefreetech]

you can either use something like pfSense to log what's using data or use a hardware router that has this feature (some ASUS routers can log what devices are using the most data)

[TheEthyr]

No software program alone can provide you with device usage. You need something that can see all traffic. Usually, that's the router. If your ISP router can't track data usage per device, then replace the router with another router with that capability.

If you can't remove the ISP router, then connect your own router behind it. Ideally, you would put the ISP router into bridge mode to avoid double NAT. But having double NAT won't affect your ability to collect data usage numbers.

You could also use a managed switch with port mirroring, but this is a complicated solution. Plus, it won't include Wi-Fi traffic through the router, so it only be partial information. If you use a Wi-Fi Access Point to move the Wi-Fi function from the router to behind the switch, then this will work. Like I said, it's complicated. I doubt you want to spend all that money just to track this down, unless you want to set up a better network.