How to Monitor Bandwidth Usage per Device on Your Home Network

The internet is slow again. Video calls stutter, the stream drops to blurry, and the game lags. Before you call your provider, it's worth answering two questions. Is the line delivering what you pay for? And if it is, who is using it?

We'll answer both with DeviceShelf. What you see is the demo network, a made-up home with forty-four devices, so the numbers are examples. The steps are the same on your own network.

Start with the line itself. Open Diagnostics. The first box is a speed test.

Click Start. DeviceShelf measures the latency first, then downloads and uploads test data against Cloudflare's speed test servers. It takes a few seconds.

Four numbers come back. Download and upload are what your contract talks about. Latency is how long a single round trip takes, and jitter is how much that time jumps around. For video calls and games, low jitter matters more than raw speed.

Two tips. Run the test when things feel slow and again when they feel fine, so you have something to compare. And if you can, run it once over a cable. If the cable is fast and Wi-Fi is slow, the problem is in your home, not at your provider.

The rest of this page helps when the line itself misbehaves. Internet status checks whether you're online and whether name resolution works. Ping and traceroute show where along the way the delay starts.

Say the line is fine. Then something inside your home is using it. Open Bandwidth. This view watches the network traffic live and adds it up per device.

Watching traffic needs a permission the operating system doesn't hand out by default. On a Mac, click Set up BPF access once and enter your admin password. A small signed helper takes care of it from then on, without running the whole app as administrator. On Windows you install the free Npcap driver, on Linux you start DeviceShelf with sudo.

Then switch on live capture. After a second or two the list fills up.

Every row is a device with what it's downloading and uploading right now. The numbers are smoothed over a few seconds, so a single burst doesn't make a bar jump around. Watch the rows overtake each other as devices start and stop.

Right at the top: the PlayStation, at around fifty megabits per second. That's a game update, and it explains the stuttering video call. Below it the MacBook, two TVs that are streaming, and the NAS, which is uploading a backup.

One thing you should know here, and it applies to any tool that does this: a computer can only count the traffic that reaches it. In a normal home network, the switch and the Wi-Fi deliver each device's data only to that device. On an ordinary laptop you'll therefore mostly see your own traffic.

You see the whole house when DeviceShelf runs where the traffic passes: on a computer connected to the mirror port of a managed switch, or on the machine that is your router. The demo is set up that way. If your network isn't, the next step gets you most of the way there anyway.

Managed switches and routers count the traffic on every port themselves, and they report it over a standard protocol called SNMP. Open your switch in the device list. Here it's a UniFi switch with twenty-four ports.

In the Tools section there's a Live-Traffic button. DeviceShelf asks the switch for its counters, waits a second, asks again and works out the speed of every port.

Port one is the uplink to the router, so everything going to the internet passes through it. Port five is busy downloading, while the rest are nearly idle. Now you only need to know what's connected to port five.

If your network runs on UniFi, connect the controller under Settings, Scanning. DeviceShelf then shows for every device which access point or switch port it's connected to. With other brands, the port is printed on the switch or in its web page.

The SNMP settings live in the same place. Most switches use the community name public for read access, or you enter a version three user. Read access is enough. DeviceShelf never changes anything on the switch.

Sometimes nobody is using the bandwidth, and the Wi-Fi is just bad. Open Network. At the top you see which network this computer is on, the channel, the band and the signal strength. Minus forty-six dBm is a strong signal. Below minus seventy, things start to get slow.

Further down, Nearby Wi-Fi lists every network in range with its channel and signal. If half the street sits on the same channel as you, moving your router to a quieter one can help more than any upgrade.

The last kind of slow is a device that keeps dropping off the network. That's what Monitoring is for. With background monitoring on, DeviceShelf scans at a fixed interval and keeps track of who answered.

The uptime list sorts the problem cases first. Almost everything here is at a hundred percent, except the Raspberry Pi, at just under ninety-seven.

Open the device and go to History. The availability strip shows when it was reachable, the curve shows its response time, and the outage is listed with start and end. A device that drops out every evening at the same time usually has a power or Wi-Fi problem, not a broken network.

Under Settings, Alerts, you decide when a device counts as offline. Standard waits for three missed scans in a row, so a phone that dozes for a minute isn't reported. Instant reacts to a single miss, and tolerant waits for six.

And under Checks you can watch the internet connection itself, and add your own checks with thresholds: for example a warning when the ping to your router goes above fifty milliseconds. Every check reports through the same notifications as everything else.

So: the speed test rules out the line. Live bandwidth shows who is using the connection, as far as this computer can see, and the switch counters fill in the rest. If it isn't bandwidth at all, check the Wi-Fi channel and look for devices that keep dropping out.

In the next video we'll check how secure your home network is: open ports, known vulnerabilities, and what to fix first. DeviceShelf runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, at deviceshelf dot app.