Troubleshooting network issues can be tricky. That's why we appreciate creators like Mr Canoehead—as he's known on Reddit—who has come forward with a new solution. Better yet, this network performance monitor project has maker written all over it, as it's based on a Raspberry Pi.
Built on top of a Raspberry Pi 3 B+, the project is designed to monitor network activity and performance. It uses the data to create a report with critical information, like network speeds and bandwidth measurements, making it much easier to track issues and when they arise.
The system is designed to use five network interfaces. Two are reserved as a transparent Ethernet bridge for monitoring the bandwidth between the modem and router. Mr Canoehead provided a diagram of the configuration in his post (see below).
The monitoring system stores the information in a database and uses it to compile a daily report. The readings are formatted into a graph so you can see spikes and drops at a glance.
This example report shows the download/upload speed, latency and an outage at 10 p.m.:
According to Mr Canoehead, the Raspberry Pi network monitor has very little impact on the overall network performance. The biggest issue is a slight latency increase caused by the transparent Ethernet bridge.
If you'd like to read more about this project, read the full post on Reddit. Mr Canoehead provided plenty of resources that explain his project and how to get started to create it yourself. You can also follow Mr Canoehead on Reddit for more updates and future Pi projects.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Ash Hill is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware with a wealth of experience in the hobby electronics, 3D printing and PCs. She manages the Pi projects of the month and much of our daily Raspberry Pi reporting while also finding the best coupons and deals on all tech.
-
TreadBreakerStrikesBack I would run this setup on the Raspberry PI 4 only. It has true gigabit speeds. The ethernet on the raspberry pi 3+ is on USB2 so the max it can reach is 330 Mbps. Basically cutting throughput by 1/3. I wouldn't want my entire home network running through a USB2 bus...Reply -
grimfox Very few people... in the US at least... have internet speeds faster than 200Mbps. The vast majority are probably sub 100Mbps. I feel like this is a feature that would be better implemented through a router. I'm surprised it's not already a feature in most routers. Most are linux based anyway and would be able to implement a very low latency version of this.Reply