Monitor activities on your home network

• Posted by pcwrt
• in Parental Control, Security
• on May 6, 2020
• 2 Comments.

The pcWRT router provides two ways to monitor your network activities. You can view every site visited (or blocked) by each device (or user) by clicking the “View Logs” link on the Access Control page. And you can view the bandwidth consumption of each device on the Bandwidth Monitor page.

Access Logs

Click the View Logs link on the Access Control page to enter the Internet Logs page.

The Internet Logs page displays a bar chart showing all web sites visited during the past two hours, where you can:

1. Drill down to the profile and user by clicking links on the left
2. Drill down to 15 minute intervals by clicking on the bars displayed
3. Come out of drilldowns by clicking on the Total link or a blank area on the bar chart.
4. Click on a site link to see the full domain name, protocol and port.
5. Click on the left and right navigation icons to navigate to the previous 2 hour bracket or the next 2 hour bracket.

To see what sites are blocked, click the Blocked tab. The “blocked” view basically shows the same information. But it also displays a table showing the block counts by blocked reason.

Access Logs Raw Mode

You can switch to the raw mode by clicking on the Raw/Chart switch.

The navigation and drill down controls are the same as that in chart mode. But the raw mode gives a lot more details about each request. This is especially useful when something was falsely blocked, or an app or web site was not working as expected.

For visited web sites, the row mode also records the first 15 bytes of a new connection. So that you can get a glimpse of what’s being sent out.

Bandwidth Monitor

The Bandwidth Monitor page displays the bandwidth consumption for each device. It also displays a pie chart so that you can easily see which devices are using the most bandwidth.

And, if Access Control is enabled for a device, you can find out which web sites consumed the most bandwidth (from that device) by clicking on the device name.