Home Network Monitoring Software: Watch Every Device 24/7

A network scan tells you who is on your network right now. Monitoring tells you what happened while you weren't looking: which device went offline at night, which one is new since yesterday, and whether the internet dropped while you were at work. In this video we look at home network monitoring that runs around the clock, and at what it shows you.

We use DeviceShelf Server. It's the version of DeviceShelf that runs on an always-on machine, a NAS, a Raspberry Pi, a mini PC or a home server, and you open it in the browser. Everything here is its demo network, a made-up home with forty six devices. No real addresses.

Why a server? An app on your laptop or phone only watches while it's open. The laptop sleeps, the phone goes in your pocket, and the moment something interesting happens, nobody is looking. The server scans every five minutes, day and night, and keeps everything it sees.

The dashboard opens with four numbers: how many devices are online, how many the server keeps track of, the network it watches, and when the last scan ran.

Below that are the rankings that matter for monitoring: the worst availability, the longest downtime and the most events. Here the ESP32 sensor in the garden was only reachable eighty five percent of the time, and the iPhone SE caused the most events, because a phone comes and goes all day.

Then the full device table: name, IP address, hardware address, vendor, open ports and response time. A green dot means online right now.

Search narrows it down by name, address, hardware address or vendor. And the new only filter shows the devices that joined while the server was watching and nobody has answered for yet. Two are waiting here.

On the right is the timeline. Every new device, every device that went offline and came back, every new open port is written down with the time. That's the record of what happened while you weren't looking.

Click a device to open its details. This is the ESP32 sensor from the ranking. At the top: its addresses, vendor, type and when it was first and last seen.

Under History, the server shows the device's availability and response times over time. Gaps are times it didn't answer. This sensor drops out every so often, which fits a battery device far away in the garden.

Under Monitoring you decide how closely to watch it. You can mute its notifications, or tell the server to count it as offline only after several missed checks, so a sleepy device doesn't wake you up.

Close the details, and back to the overview.

The Alarms view lists what's wrong right now, with the most serious problems on top. A full disk on the NAS, two containers in trouble, a virtual machine that's stopped, and a DNS check that answers too slowly. Each row shows since when, and a thirty day trend, so you see at a glance whether it's new or keeps coming back.

Reports turns the history into numbers. Pick a window, from twenty four hours to ninety days. The internet connection gets its own record of every outage, which you can save as a PDF, handy when you call your provider.

Below that, every device with its uptime, and a calendar of daily availability. Green days were fine, yellow and red days had outages. One look tells you whether a device fails now and then or every evening at the same time.

At the very end there's even a year in review: how many devices joined, which ones were most reliable, and how often the internet was down.

Monitoring is only useful if it tells you. Under Settings, Alerts and notifications, you choose what you want to hear about: a new or unknown device, a new open port, a changed address, a device going offline or coming back.

And where. A push message to your phone through ntfy, Gotify or Pushover, a message in Discord or Telegram, an e-mail, and over a hundred other services. Quiet hours keep the night silent, and maintenance windows mute everything while you work on the network.

To sum up: a monitoring server watches your network all the time, not just while an app is open. The dashboard and timeline show what changed, each device has its own history, Alarms shows what's wrong now, Reports shows uptime over weeks, and alerts reach you wherever you are. DeviceShelf Server runs in Docker or as a package on Linux, macOS and Windows. The link is in the description.