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Best Method to Monitor Home LAN

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bzowk

New Around Here
Hey Guys -

I'm posting to hopefully get some ideas for the best way to centrally monitor the health & performance of my home LAN - if even possible given my hardware. Below is some information about it, what i currently use, and what I'm looking for specifically.

Environment
I work from home where I have a small network with everything on one subnet which includes 2 routers, 3 switches, 6 laptops, 5 workstations, 12 VMs, and numerous IoT & mobile devices. Recently, I've noticed some issues were bandwidth and latency seem to be heavily affected as tools I have to monitor connectivity of services on other ethernet-connected systems show them offline briefly although they are not.

Network Environment
Aside from mobile & IoT devices, almost everything (That's important) is connected via ethernet. The issues I'm having above are from ethernet-connected systems as well where most are gigabit connections with a couple exceptions. My network equipment includes:
  • 1 Primary Router / Internet Gateway / WiFi AP - WRT1900ACS running LEDE (OpenWRT)
  • 1 "Smart" Switch - TL-SG108E - Semi-managed switch used to connect my primary systems via ethernet. t provides features like IGMP, QOS, and port mirroring, but not SNMP
  • 2 "Dumb" Switches
  • 1 Router configured strictly as AP solely used for my 2 amazon cloud cams only (Cams aren't compatible with LEDE for whatever reason)
What I Currently Use
Currently, I just use Grafana, InnoDB, & Telegraf - all on a dedicated VM - to provide an overview of things like system resources for key workstations and overall bandwidth. The data for these graphs is gathered over an SNMP connection to my primary router via Telegraf, stored in InnoDB, then graphed in Grafana. I also review logs plus graphing in my primary router occasionally. Finally, I've used WireShark before, but more for troubleshooting specific connection issues - not monitoring numerous connections.

What I'm Looking For
I'd like to have a central app or hosted tool which gathers or has forwarded all network information (primarily the primary router, smart switch, and if helpful network data from a couple of endpoints) where I can view network health and determine if there are any potential issues. Obviously, the dumb switches won't provide anything and the 2nd router is only for 2 cameras so unneeded. The primary router has SNMP (plus tons of capability running LEDE (OpenWRT) however acts more like an internety gateway and WiFi AP as the majority of ethernet traffic goes through the Smart Switch - not this router. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much detailed logging nor SNMP in the Smart Switch where I think the issue is occurring. It has a web interface where the monitoring options are port mirroring, basic port stats, cable testing, & loop prevention; but there are no SNMP options. I hoped maybe it was enabled by default so tried connecting using snmpwalk to it yesterday and there wasn't a connection.

So - Any suggestions? I've considered replacing the smart switch with an older gigabit router - at least for the heavy traffic ports - so I could install OpenWRT on it and get better stats, but am torn as the reason I got the smart switch (recently) was the hope it could handle the large amount of traffic better than a dumb one.

Any suggestions are appreciated - Thanks!
 

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