More important things become, more monitoring and overseeing they require. That’s how it is supposed to be. We don’t want anything to go wrong with what we deem valuable, especially with regard to home network monitoring. In times where anything and everything in our day-to-day lives, revolve around the much-revered internet, what can be more precious than the gadgets and tools facilitating us to utilize it whenever we want?

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What is Home Network Monitoring?

In a nutshell, what I am trying to say is, watching over and monitoring our home network and tools it comprises of is as mandatory as seeing over anything else holding the utmost importance in our lives. It is formally known as home network monitoring, in the terminology of Computer technology. 

It provides you the power to see all that is going on internally with the network, what device is not functioning as it should, what are the ways that can aid improvement, which ones are performing well, and don’t need any alterations in them. 

Home Network
Home Network

You can also inspect other pieces of the puzzle. For example – how much space and time is in use, so on and so forth! The question, again, is how? 

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There are more than a few software out there that allow you to do home network monitoring, and thus be up-to-date with the status of the same.

The tools/means available for home network monitoring out there include some big names like Atera, NPM, PRTG. All these include premium versions for large scale businesses. Apart from that, they offer free sign up trails and variants without any advance fee. 

A Guide to set-up Home Network Monitoring Employing PRTG Software Tool

I’m going to go ahead and discuss what’s it like to aid PRTG software to arrange for a home network monitoring environment and what it takes. So we shall proceed step-wise, to not make things more complicated than they are.

Step 1: Software Installation and arranging settings of PRTG for use

But obviously, you have to get your hand on the software before you can begin using it. So, For installing PRTG, you’ll have to stop by at their official website and get the free trial of the software.

Then follow the standard procedure to launch it on your system. That is all you have to do as far as installation goes.

How to use PRTG for your home network monitoring?

You’ll have to set it up a bit, for your convenience and ease. Various things will need some tweaking, let’s see which ones:

So after the installation process is all done well, the main page of the software will open up in whichever browser you use as your default one. The various settings you should do from scratch include:

  • Password:

It is one that I’d personally recommend. When you get a new tool, the passwords that are already in place, are mostly complicated and vulnerable. It is thus, utterly necessary to change them, and while we’re at it, don’t forget to choose the one that consists of a combination of alphanumerics.

You can perform this alteration by going to the setting option and, from then onwards to the account option and further to the tab saying user account. Do remember to write it down somewhere initially.

  • Details of Default Devices and Port Numbers:

Both of these are not mandatory or something, but it hurts none to have some extra security measures in place, right? 

So the first one can be set in action by going to the option that displays all the existing devices. Then onto the settings, thereon choose the bar, which describes it as a probe setting variant. If you want to change the credentials, you’ll have to toggle off the inherit option of each of these devices.

Moving forward, it could place by spotting the administrative tool option. Then, get to the tab under the webserver and choose expert configurations. Now, you may use the SSL option for security for setting up your new port number.

It is required because sometimes the new devices might be using the same port numbers as the existing ones, which can lead to clashes. Why take unnecessary risks, right?

It concludes our first step in performing the home network monitoring procedure.

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Step 2: Clearing Up the Unwanted Stuff.

By default, PRTG runs its module that automatically detects some of the devices and divides them into groups, but some groups also go unnecessarily empty. The role of this step in home network monitoring is to eliminate and clean up all these groups. 

You can do so by placing focus on devices and clicking your mouse’s right button, then hitting the delete option. That’s all there is to this step.

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Step 3 : Adding and Arranging into Groups

When in a network for personal use, you don’t need very lengthy and detailed structures. You need to categorize whatever small number of devices to relevant groups. Done with this step, you can start with home network monitoring, which is our main motive. Just form a group and name it temp, also, You can do so by following the instructions given as under:

  • Firstly you need to find your IP address, range of address, and save them for later.
  • Having created the group, you need to enter the range in the text-box prompting for it, leave all others the way it is.
  • After the processing ceases, you can place the devices where they belong. Some devices that it has detected will have names. Others will have IP addresses.
  • So put the ones you can recognize in their places by clicking on the device and then choosing the move to option.
  • As for the unrecognizable ones, place the ones which have your IP address(which you earlier found out) as their name to the group related to network infrastructure.

Step 4: Process of Scanning and Network Map Creation 

To thoroughly scan the devices, enter the credentials of the system, and sign in to allow the process to proceed. Once accomplished, you can have every sensor of the device, along with other stuff.

Now you get on with creating networking maps to oversee the traffic, click on add map and adjust its specifications.

Step 5: Cleansing the Sensors 

This one phase of home network monitoring is required if you want to utilize graphs in the maps. The more the graphs harder it makes to skim through the network. The only ones that are deemed relevant are ones showing incoming and outgoing traffic.

You can eliminate the rest by choosing the one labeled hide from graphs under the network sensor category.

Step 6: Traffic Monitor 

As important as this is, one cannot sit all day on your computer and continually checking it for faults. So what you do instead if, set up notifications for the system to ping you whenever something is amiss. Easy peasy?

You can set it up in the system admin option by checking-in certain choices.

To see whether the changes work, made by you in the home network monitoring process or not, hit on the icon shaped like a bell, which resides under the notification category.

Notifications can be added to the existing ones by

  • Choosing plus symbol present under the Notification trigger category and clicking to add one.

You can enable us for notification whenever specific triggers fire itself, e.g., when a system exceeds the data limit that you set.

You can also check the bandwidth of data. A device uses by choosing the device you want to oversee, then choose range option lying under the network sensor card category.

Conclusion

So this was all there was about Home network monitoring. Now, you may follow the notification about everything that is going in your home territory network. You can consult this article if you have any problem related to the same. I’m happy to help.

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