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How to monitor all my devices: laptops, phones, smart TV, etc

Often it is important to know how much data the devices in your network are using, especially if your Internet service provider imposes caps, limits or penalties. Knowing the per-device usage history can be crucial in identifying traffic drain culprits and staying within your traffic allowances and budget.

Unfortunately, even in a common home network it can be difficult to get a comprehensive picture of your data usage, as it often consists of vastly different devices (computers, phones, TVs, gaming consoles, set-top streaming boxes, home appliances, etc), while the router firmware offers only very limited, if any, tools for traffic monitoring.

Monitoring your data with the router

Your router should have the most accurate information about the Internet data usage. Since all devices in your network are connected to the Internet through the router, it is the single point where all data transfers can be monitored and logged.

However, most home routers offer a very limited set of data-monitoring features, or none at all. They also usually have no history or logs for the user to see how much data their devices consumed in the past day, week or month. Some advanced routers have the monitoring and logging functionality, but they rarely offer any per-device data usage history.

To improve the situation, the users have to utilise third-party router firmware, which may require above-average knowledge and experience.

Monitoring your data on the individual devices in your network

If your router doesn't offer any user-friendly tools for capturing and logging your data usage, you can instead do this on each individual device by using a monitoring application like NetWorx or NetGenius, which offers a user-friendly interface together with extensive and flexible logs, reports, usage history and statistics.

However, this option also has limitations: you can only monitor data on those devices where such application can be installed. For example, if you have a Windows PC, Mac laptop, Android phone, iPad, smart TV and some home appliance connected to the Internet, they will all be running different operating systems, which means no one universal app can be installed on all of them.

Using NetWorx for data monitoring and logging

NetWorx can only monitor traffic on the computer where it is installed. If you want to monitor traffic on multiple computers, you basically have two options:

Install NetWorx on every computer in your network. This can only be done if all your computers are running Windows or macOS.
If your router supports SNMP or UPnP protocol, you can monitor all traffic via your router. This however will not give you a per-device usage breakdown and the monitoring computer must be continuously on to poll the router and collect usage data.

Using NetGenius for data monitoring and logging

Similarly, NetGenius can only monitor traffic on the computers where it is installed. However, unlike NetWorx, NetGenius is only available for Windows and consists of two components: the system service that does all the monitoring work and must be installed on every computer you wish to monitor, and the management console that enables you to interact with the service and must be installed on at least one computer.