I’d appreciate any advice on how I could set up an email alert. I’d like to be alerted whenever a device on my network exceeds a daily download limit.
I’m using a Balance 20X. I found the WAN Bandwidth Allowance Monitor setting, but that doesn’t help much.
I’m occasionally running into trouble with a device going mad and downloading up to 80 GB per day. This has happened with an Apple TV and an Amazon Echo. It’s pretty easy to spot in the Balance’s Usage Reports, but I don’t (and don’t want to) routinely check those. I only know there’s a problem when my ISP tells me that 75% of our monthly bandwidth has been used.
The Balance itself doesn’t currently appear to offer this kind of alert. It would be great if it could be added to a future firmware. The data is already collected for Usage Reports, so it would just need a daily job to run and the UI to set a daily limit.
Can anyone recommend a solution that could work with or alongside the Balance router to provide reporting/alerting on individual device data usage?
We do not have to worry about the WAN traffic, but are always concerned about cellular - with over 1,000 devices in use, all with the cellular as backup we have to watch usage carefully.
There are several overlapping solutions, but none are exactly what we all want…but pretty close.
First - At my request Peplink added the “safety catch” where you can set it to either:
Reserve for management traffic when usage hits 100% of monthly allowance
Disconnect when usage hits 100% of monthly allowance
The first one does not drop the connection - just blocks traffic. SO in control stays connected and you have remote access to review what is driving the traffic.
This has been a major ass-saver for us! Previously we had one guy use 180G in 30 hours before we caught it. Now we keep this set at 5G or 10G.
You can also have the device email you at 75% of that limit.
You can also set group level alerts in IC2 based on usage. So you can set a “pool” limit for a group of devices. But that pool can be 1 device or hundreds. the alerts look like this:
"SIM pool usage of “Verizon (US)” reached 50.698% (10.14 out of 20 GB) on 2021-02-18 18:45:35.
No. of SIMs: 267
Start day: on day 17 of each month at 00:00 midnight.
Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. I think this option comes closest, but still falls short of what I’d like:
You can also set group level alerts in IC2 based on usage. So you can set a “pool” limit for a group of devices. But that pool can be 1 device or hundreds. the alerts look like this:
"SIM pool usage of “Verizon (US)” reached 50.698% (10.14 out of 20 GB) on 2021-02-18 18:45:35.
Three concerns with this:
I’m only running one router and it’s local, so I don’t really have any other need to use IC2 right now.
I’d like an alert to apply to any device on the network, without having to set up and maintain a pool.
I’d like to be notified if a device exceeds a daily limit rather than a monthly one.
I’m using Comcast cable with a 1.2 TB cap. Normally I don’t come close to this, but have exceeded it a few times when devices have gone rogue.
Also using cellular as the backup. It would be nice to have different levels for each WAN. For example, alert if any device exceeds 10 GB in one day on Comcast and alert if any device exceeds 1 GB in one day on cellular.