Comments on: Raspberry Pi Network Monitor: Free Dashboard for Home Internet Traffic

By: PaulM

PaulM — Wed, 09 Aug 2023 21:32:53 +0000

Brilliant, many thanks for your efforts. Just what I was looking for to keep an eye on the use of the internet by my teenage grand-daughters. Took me a couple of hours to set up the Pi, install the software and get it all working, simply connected to the network behind my ISP router 🙂
Just one question, how easy would it be to add a list of named IP addresses and get the (known) names displayed in Grafana in place of the IP addresses ? I’m not a programmer but can usally cobble together enough Python to get a job done, some pointers as to how to achieve this would be extremely helpful.

By: PiNetTester

PiNetTester — Tue, 09 Aug 2022 23:46:11 +0000

So I have a cable connection and therefore can’t put the Pi on the WAN side of the main router. I also don’t have a USB Ethernet port so looking to use only the on board Pi port (using a virtual interface/IP) ([link to forums.raspberrypi.com])

I was looking to set the Pi up on the LAN side of the ISP router. The 192.168.0.x/24 network would only have one ip (.1) on the LAN of the ISP router and one ip (.2) on the WAN side of the Pi. The Pi would then have a second (virtual) interface with 192.168.1.x/24 subnet running the DHCP server. All network devices would be on the 192.168.1.x/24 subnet.

Any reason why this wouldn’t work? I know it would double the bandwidth used on the Pi ethernet connection but it’s 1Gbps so it should have lots of headroom.

I briefly tried it but couldn’t get it to respond to DHCP requests.

By: rimno

rimno — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 11:39:58 +0000

Hello, Zane.
Thank you for this tutorial.
I don’t know if you are still checking out this page but I’ve got a question.
I seem to have got the python code and dashboard set up and working, but I’ve got two problems, and I was hoping to get some help.

First, the downloaded bytes seem to be very small. Like I am only getting about tenth or lesser bytes recorded in the dashboard.
My guess would be that when tcpdump outputs multiple lines of same contents very fast, the python code seems to only get the first or the last and discards all the duplicates, which is not ideal as the length (bytes) get decreased significantly.

Second, I seem to not get some of the records from tcpdump to transfer to the dashboard.
eq. While I can find the below record in the raspberry pi (192.168.100.189:8000/metrics), “comcast.net” doesn’t show up in the “bytes transferred (by server)” part of the dashboard.
“ntm_packets_total{dst=”comcast.net”,proto=”udp”,service=””,src=”192.168.100.191″} 7056.0″
This, I have no idea why it’s happening.

Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance.

By: Dan

Dan — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 03:45:02 +0000

Zane, How can I make this totally passive so I could install this at a customer site and collect usage data. I just want to be able to collect usage data for a week or two so I know what is actually being consumed average and peak. It would need to store the data on the RPI or have an email method to send me the collected resulting data. That way I don’t have to reconfigure anything at the customer site. Thx

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 12:22:10 +0000

Thanks,
followed the above, using rpi 3B+ sat inside my network, with Grafana installed on HomeAssistant(rpi 4)
Url in Grafana is set to the 3B+ port 8000
If I do Save and test on teh data source I get the following error
Error reading Prometheus: bad_response: readObjectStart: expect { or n, but found #, error found in #1 byte of …|# HELP pyth|…, bigger context …|# HELP python_gc_objects_collected_total Objects co|…
it looks like grafana is reading everything including the # HELP # TYPE etc. is there a way to get it to ignore these? so it only reads what it is expecting??
Thanks

By: Bob

Bob — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 10:36:36 +0000

Hi there, thanks for the tutorial. I am running into a problem that I cannot connect the prometheus instance to my existing Grafana server. I am running Grafana inside Home Assistant and this is the error I get.

Error reading Prometheus: Post “http://10.71.71.1:8000/metrics/api/v1/query”: dial tcp 10.71.71.1:8000: connect: no route to host. -10.71.71.0 is my subnet.

I have tried doing port scans on the router and found that both ports 8000 and 9090 aren’t open even though both programs – python and prometheus – are running without any errors.
Thanks in advance.

By: Simon

Simon — Mon, 23 May 2022 12:22:02 +0000

In reply to (zane) / Technically Wizardry.

Hello, I’m finally about to give this a go!

I’m keeping the router as the DHCP server and will connect the pi to that and have the router set the static address.

Do I then just follow the alternate settings or do I still need to do the bridging eth0 and eth1 step in your original reply. and then install what after that?

Thanks!

By: spydr

spydr — Thu, 19 May 2022 22:17:51 +0000

Thanks for the tutorial! I have an alternate design. I work from home, and my company provides a hardware firewall, that also acts as the router for my home network. Everything (work and non-work data) goes through my wireless router, acting as a access point (no DHCP). I’m trying to determine how much of my monthly data usage is due to my kids gaming, etc. So the pi is purely for monitoring throughput on the home side. The problem I’m having is in the Grafana setup, everything is in terms of Mbps in your dashboard. I’ve fiddled with adding panels, and changing the definition of the existing ones, but I’ve had no luck. I’m looking for the total data passed for each device. Any ideas on how I can modify/create a panel to summarize my total usage/time period based on IP address? Here’s an example of how my ISP shows my total usage: [link to imgur.com]
Thanks!

By: Papu Gomez

Papu Gomez — Thu, 14 Apr 2022 19:38:43 +0000

Hi, I really appreciate this project and it can fit in perfectly with the master’s thesis I am doing. I have a small problem when representing the data in Grafana for each device. I am running an access point in bridge mode with the hostapd daemon on a raspberry pi. So when prometheus captures the information it only shows the devices connected by LAN but it doesn’t show Grafana any wireless devices. I would greatly appreciate some clarification on where I can fix this problem.

By: Matt

Matt — Tue, 01 Feb 2022 02:12:54 +0000

Wow, so awesome! Thanks for sharing!

First: This whole setup works perfectly with Raspberry Pi OS – Bullseye, prometheus 2.33 and Grafana 8.3.4.

Second: Like others have commented here, it would be nice to have host names in the graphs rather than IP addresses. I’ve got 30 IP devices in the house, it’s hard to keep track. Here’s how I do it:
1. Manually maintain a list of IP devices –> hostnames I’ve assigned in /etc/hosts:
192.168.0.2 -network_accesspoint_basement
192.168.0.102 -security_WyzeCam_back_yard
192.168.0.117 -entertainment_Sonos_kitchen
etc.
2. Notice the dash in front of each device name. So in the Grafana dashboard I edited the Regex for LocalIPs to be “/^\-|^192.168.0./”
3. In the first several hours/days using this system, some forgotten devices pop up. So just edit /etc/hosts, save, then (since I’m using systemd for the tcpdump, etc.) just restart the service to get the new IP–>hostname mapping:
sudo systemctl stop network-metrics
sudo systemctl start network-metrics

Works pretty well so far!