Network monitor

Joined
Apr 11, 2013
Messages
194
Reaction score
2
Points
18
Your Mac's Specs
13" rMBP 2014, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 2.6GHz i5
Hello everybody. I am trying to find an app which will monitor network usage on our home network.

I am the administrator of the Family Macbook, but my children use their own Macbooks. I am hoping there is an app which I an install on my Macbook which can monitor network usage, such as websites visited.

I am looking for find an app which is as cheap as possible, if not free. I have seen there is Netuse Traffic Monitor, although I am not sure it does what I need and its quite expensive.

I don't want my children to know I am monitoring their usage or I would just apply some parental controls. I want to give them freedom unless I know they are abusing this freedom.
 
C

chas_m

Guest
I am not a parent, but (depending on the age of the children involved) wouldn't letting them know you are monitoring their Internet use be a better approach? Wouldn't that make them less likely to visit "bad" sites? You'd know better than I, of course, but "spying" on the kids surreptitiously is bound to cause trust issues at some point ...

My father-in-law (this is some time ago now, so his technique may not work these days) had a clever way of "monitoring" Internet use: the only computer that was allowed to be connected to the net was in the main room of the house, and faced everyone. He (and sometimes anybody) wasn't in the room all the time, but others had to pass through there to go to any other part of the house, so there was more or less constant traffic. This was pretty effective in keeping everyone "clean" on their internet use.
 
OP
imfromwales
Joined
Apr 11, 2013
Messages
194
Reaction score
2
Points
18
Your Mac's Specs
13" rMBP 2014, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD, 2.6GHz i5
Yes you are very right in what you say, although my children have laptops for school and they have smart phones. Simply putting one computer in the house is not possible. If I tell them I am monitoring them, they will most likley not believe me as I know very little about networking, so I would actually want to monitor them to say for instance that I knew they were on X site 5 minutes ago, then they would know I was monitoring them!

Ive used Debokee although it monitors everything the router does, which makes it hard to simply see websites visited, for example it shows all trackers and every single connection made through the router. I am after something that will simply show what websites my children have visited, rather than the connections made through the router for trcking websites and adds e.t.c
 

Raz0rEdge

Well-known member
Staff member
Moderator
Joined
Jul 17, 2009
Messages
15,745
Reaction score
2,071
Points
113
Location
MA
Your Mac's Specs
2022 Mac Studio M1 Max, 2023 M2 MBA
A of new routers have pretty good monitoring/filtering tools that you can use. So what router do you have? Most other monitoring tools do end up watching everything which is a bit of an overkill..
 

Shop Amazon


Shop for your Apple, Mac, iPhone and other computer products on Amazon.
We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon and affiliated sites.
Top